By Evi Tsakali,
“Same seat, different driver” a Slovak friend of mine would say while comparing our respective countries’ corrupt state; and that is the phrase I will use today to comment on the fact that, after Sunday’s election, three alt-right political parties -namely Spartiates, Elliniki Lysi, and Niki- three political parties that combined have been voted by 12% of the population, have entered the Greek Parliament. More specifically, I will use it to contemplate on how Spartiates, the party that was openly supported by the convicted leading member of Golden Dawn, Ilias Kassidiaris, entered the Parliament with flying colors.
The fault in our laws
Before the prohibition of the founded by Kassidiaris Ellines party by Areios Pagos (the Greek Supreme Court), the government’s spokesperson at the time, Giannis Oikonomou, had stated that the goal of the government’s legislative effort to block Kassidiari’s party was to “leave no room for knife-wielders, neo-Nazis, criminal organizations to deceive the Greek Justice” and “the political marginalization and disapproval of these formations”.
Personally, I had mixed feelings about a law of that sort when the decisions were issued, and I am still not fully certain about my stance on the topic; the decisions of Areios Pagos and the legal grounds they were based upon –even though I support the objective of the eradication of the far-right– are the result of judicial activism, if I may characterize it as such. Despite how proponents of their objective we may be, such decisions instigate questions and controversy regarding the quality of our democracy, its response to threats, and constitutionalism. What is worse is that these legislative efforts may have had the exact opposite effect on far-right formations; from a convicted criminal, Kassidiaris became (to the eyes of many, as the elections’ results showed), a misunderstood pariah, combatted by a “corrupted system”.
Thus, the decisions were proven to be an “institutional failure” as the renowned constitutionalist Evangelos Venizelos put it after the exit polls; not only they left us quite numb in the beginning, not feeling completely at ease with laws that ban specific parties from participating in the elections (even for what a large part of the public opinion would consider an otherwise legitimate cause), but they also fell under the radar; because both them and their legal grounds eventually failed to predict all of the possibilities… and that leads us to the fault in our social media.
The fault in our social media
As I said before, neither the decisions nor the legal grounds could predict all the possible turns of the situation; and Kassidiaris would take advantage of that legal void. Spartiates was deemed “harmless” by Areios Pagos before he expressed his support to the formation. After the decision was issued, it was his time to express it in the public sphere; behind bars, the convicted neo-Nazi -albeit imprisoned- runs his own YouTube channel where he acts essentially as the patron of this new party, which he promotes like any other political leader would as part of their pre-election rally.
Since that atypical “campaign” was held online and openly, we may wonder, why wasn’t it controlled? Why wasn’t it noticed and monitored by –perhaps– our National Intelligence Service (it wouldn’t be the first time) or the Ministry of Civil Protection? Those who should have been concerned were either negligent –or worse– indifferent; as if the leader of Spartiates Vassilis Stigkas made his party rise in popularity so suddenly out of pure political talent; as if no one could see who was the real leader of that party.
The fault in our politics
According to statistics, 12% of Spartiates had voted for Zoi Konstantopoulou’s leftist Plefsi Eleftherias in the first round of elections, while 18% of the alt-right party’s voters had not voted at all in the previous round. This is indicative of the confusion of the extremes in times of crisis, but most importantly, of the fact that Golden Dawn’s leadership may be behind bars, but their “ideals” are in the streets.
In an interview I had conducted for the Greek political section of our website before the first round of elections in May regarding the far right phenomenon (available in its entirety here in Greek), I had asked Vassiliki Georgiadou, Associate Professor of Political Science at Panteion University and Director of the National Centre for Social Research, whether the participation of many far-right groupuscules in the elections meant that the Golden Dawn Trial didn’t signify the end of the Far-right in Greece. She replied in a way that was more than confirmed by the elections’ outcome…
“The Far Right did not disappear because Golden Dawn is no longer present on the political arena. Far Right researchers approach the phenomenon from two perspectives: the perspective of supply, which means that we focus on the political parties that are active in this space – their organizational structure, their practices, their positions – and the perspective of the demand, i.e. who are the voters who vote for these parties and the reasons for such a choice. Golden Dawn ceased to claim the vote of the citizens, although it was not convicted in the so-called Golden Dawn Trial, but its high-ranking members, who could claim the vote of the electors. Thus, the supply was affected. But the demand is still there.”
This is probably the most disappointing realization of it all…that or the fact Magda Fyssa, the woman who fought for a decade to see her son’s murderers behind bars will now see their supporters in the Parliament.
I would say shame, but that would be an understatement.
References
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Σπαρτιάτες: Πώς ο Κασιδιάρης έπιασε στον ύπνο το πολιτικό σύστημα. tovima.gr. Available here
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Σπαρτιάτες: Ποιο είναι το ακροδεξιό μόρφωμα που μπαίνει στη Βουλή μετά τις εκλογές με τις ευλογίες του Κασιδιάρη. ethnos.gr. Available here
- Βασιλική Γεωργιάδου: «Η Δημοκρατία είναι ανεκτική όσο δεν θίγεται με πράξεις των πολέμιών της». offlinepost.gr. Available here
