For two years Ilias Kasidiaris, a convicted leader of the now disbanded neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party, has used social media to address supporters from Domokos prison in central Greece.
Month after month the former MP has railed against the inability of the “corrupt political regime” to govern the country in a stream of hate-filled speeches. For his 134,000 subscribers on YouTube, the exhortations are a lifeline to Kasidiaris and the Hellenes, the small nationalist party he set up shortly before being handed a 13-and-a-half-year prison term for his role in Golden Dawn. And they seem to be paying off.
Thirty months after the violent neo-fascist group was found to be a criminal gang that had masqueraded as a political organisation – targeting immigrants, killing a Greek rapper and lashing out at leftists – the appeal of the famously short-tempered Kasidiaris does not appear to have faded.
“On the contrary it seems to have grown,” says Kostis Papaioannou, who directs Signal, a research group that studies far-right extremism. “He’s even been given the opportunity to conduct radio shows from his cell and has been very effective in using social media to rally support among the young. It’s worrying. If general elections were held tomorrow his party would likely exceed the 3% threshold to get into parliament.”
On Wednesday, less than six weeks before Greece heads to the polls – and only hours after lawmakers voted to ban the Hellenes from fielding candidates – Domokos prison’s disciplinary council convened in emergency session as it began examining whether the 42-year-old had flouted prison rules permitting him to have contact solely with close family and lawyers – exchanges that can only take place using a phone card. The council is expected to announce possible punitive measures on 20 April.
Increasingly, Greeks have been asking how a notorious inmate in a high-security jail housing some of the nation’s most hardened criminals could so flagrantly violate the jail code, uploading videos on Twitter and even presiding over meetings of his party officials, albeit by phone.
Kasidiaris’s actions, which first came to light two years ago, have caused considerable embarrassment for the centre-right government. In October 2021 as the revelations surfaced, Sofia Nicolaou, the official heading the anti-crime policy unit at the Citizens’ Protection Ministry, not only called for an investigation but demanded that guards be punished if found to be aiding and abetting the prisoner. In early 2022 Nicolaou moved on; since then Kasidiaris’s interventions have flourished.
Tuesday’s late-night vote to prohibit the extremists from participating in next month’s election follows legislation passed in February that sought to make it impossible for the Hellenes to run, citing its leader’s criminal conviction.
The nationalists responded by announcing that a retired supreme court prosecutor would instead lead the party in the 21 May poll.
The latest legislation, passed with the backing of the ruling New Democracy party and centre-left Pasok, broadened the scope of the original ban, making even that impossible, although the country’s supreme court will decide on 5 May whether the law should be placed on the statute books. Opponents have accused the government of doing too little, too late, before an election that is looking increasingly close.
“It should have acted right after the court’s verdict when Golden Dawn and its leaders were judged to be a criminal organisation,” said Papaioannou. “But the government didn’t want to alienate Kasidiaris’s base. It has lost a lot of support especially among rightwingers in northern Greece and it wanted to keep channels open.”
In a nation where the Communist party was long outlawed, the ban has raised concerns over its constitutionality – the leftist opposition abstained from Tuesday’s vote arguing it would set a dangerous precedent and even work to the advantage of the unrepentant Kasidiaris.
With the once ascendant New Democracy’s popularity hit by a deadly train crash that has taken a wrecking ball to its narrative of effective governance – and no party likely to win an outright majority – smaller groups have picked up support. On the right, the Hellenes have been particularly bolstered by anti-systemic fury in the wake of a disaster perceived to have been avoidable.
Kasidiaris, the right-hand man of Golden Dawn’s self-styled “Führer”, Nikos Michaloliakos, led the extremist party’s infamous hit squads and trained its members in martial arts.
If the supreme court refuses to uphold the ban on the ultra-nationalists running, the group’s popularity could grow further, warned Dimitris Mavros, who heads the pollsters MRB.
“Right now we’re already measuring [its support] at between 4 to 4.5%,” he said, calling the role of the Hellenes party potentially decisive in the upcoming election.
