A three-member court has ended one of the most critical trials in Greece with a ruling that nearly the entire leadership of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn will be imprisoned with immediate effect for operating a criminal gang under the guise of being a political party.
In a historic decision likely to have ramifications for other extremist far-right groups, the tribunal rejected requests for the sentences of Golden Dawn’s founder, Nikos Michaloliakos, and other former MPs to be suspended pending appeal. Instead, the judges ordered that only 12 of the 51 defendants they had found guilty could remain free pending appeal.
The announcement was met with applause from anti-fascist activists gathered outside the Athens court.
Defiant until the end, the 62-year-old Michaloliakos emerged from his home in northern Athens to declare he was “proud” to be imprisoned. He and five members of his once feared inner circle face spending the next 13 years in jail.
“I am proud they are making me go to prison for my ideas,” he told journalists before giving himself up to police. “At some point, some will be ashamed by this decision. We will be vindicated by history and the Greek people.”
Applauded by assembled family and friends, he thanked the party’s supporters and denounced the “dirty junta that exists in the media, political life of the country and in justice”.
Michaloliakos’s wife, Eleni Zouralia, was among five ex-Golden Dawn deputies whose jail terms were suspended until an appeals court hearing.
Former MPs and senior operatives soon surrendered themselves to authorities, and police arrested 11 people in the courtroom where the ruling was made. By late Thursday, only Christos Pappas, the de-facto number two in the party, remained at large among the convicted leaders. Arrest warrants will be issued for others who fail to hand themselves over.
The decision concludes a politically charged trial that at five and a half years will go down as one of the longest in modern times.
A fringe organisation before it was catapulted into parliament with 21 MPs in 2012, Golden Dawn has now all but collapsed. The popular fury at EU-mandated austerity that galvanised 500,000 Greeks to vote for the extremists at the peak of the country’s economic crisis is no more.
Defections and infighting have also helped crush a party that at its height was the third biggest political force in Greece. But it is the court’s landmark verdict that officially rings in the end of an era.
From the outset, dismantling a group elected by democratic process was fraught with difficulty. Both prior to and during the seven-year period in which the party was in parliament, the far-rightists executed a reign of terror until the murder of a Greek anti-fascist rap singer, Pavlos Fyssas, triggered a judicial investigation into it activities. Criminal charges were eventually brought in four cases, including the stabbing of Fyssas and attacks on four Egyptian fishermen and on trade unionists, although judges also took into account countless attacks on leftists, migrants and refugees by Golden Dawn assault squads.
The extremists’ embrace of nazism, their belief in violence for violence’s sake and the cult of personality around Michaloliakos, the party’s self-styled “führer”, was such that even other far-right groups shunned them.
“This is a huge victory for the anti-racist, anti-fascist movement,” Petros Constantinou, the coordinator of the country’s premier anti-fascist group, KEERFA, said of Thursday’s ruling. “It sends a message across Europe that there can be no tolerance for fascist parties exploiting political and economic crises to move centre-stage.”
