On a grey, drizzly Saturday morning, the farmer’s market downtown is bustling with hundreds of customers. There is a fresh citrus tang in the air as farmers unload the first of the season’s oranges. The produce is sold directly to the public, which keeps prices down: a kilogram of oranges costs 35 cents, eggplants are one euro per kilo. But even these prices are too high for some Greeks, which is why there are nearly as many people at Golden Dawn’s food handout outside the party’s newly opened office in Alimos, a middle-class neighbourhood. An hour before the food distribution starts, a line of about 500 people snakes down the sidewalk.
The young and old, the unemployed, men and women too poor to buy food have come to collect free groceries from Greece’s ultra-nationalist party.
Constantinos Chartsias, 36, made a 20-kilometre round-trip journey just to collect a plastic bag of carrots and potatoes. “I haven’t worked in two years and this is the only help I get,” he says, stamping out a cigarette and zipping up his black leather jacket. “Things are going from bad to worse,” adds the former salesman.“We should start caring about the country. We need to start changing our mentality, like evading tickets on public transport, or not jumping the queue, or a plumber not giving a receipt for his work to evade taxes. If we start changing these things the political elite will, too.”
Greece is suffering more than any other country from the global economic crisis, now in its fourth year. In a country of 10.7 million people, 4.5 million are either unemployed or have stopped looking for work, according to Elstat, the Greek statistics agency. Fear and despair are driving Greece: fear of being thrown out of the 17-nation Eurozone, whose leaders are dictating the terms of Greece’s bailout, despair of ceaseless austerity, fear of immigrants overrunning the country. A terrible brew simmers — xenophobia, rage and the desire for revenge.
There are stories of parents abandoning their children because they are too poor to look after them. In the first five months of 2011, the suicide rate rose by 40 per cent. Most of the deaths were blamed on the financial crisis. It is a shocking statistic in a nation blessed with an easy-going Mediterranean culture where suicide rates have always been the lowest in Europe.
Enter Golden Dawn.
The party won 18 seats in parliament in May’s election and it is opening offices nearly every week — 49 at last count, up from eight during the elections. It is broadening its support from the usual anti-social neo-Nazis to the moderate middle ground: the young and old, professionals and blue collar workers, housewives and grandmothers. If an election were held today, Golden Dawn would surge to third place in parliament with 12 per cent of the vote, according to a September survey of 1,000 Greeks by the polling firm VPRC.
“I voted for Golden Dawn because I am a nationalist, because I believe we are a superior race,” Chartsias says. He nods in approval at the sight of two Golden Dawn volunteers sweeping the grimy sidewalk. “Herodotus said, ‘same religion, same blood, same language.’”
The famous words of the ancient historian who helped define ethnic nationalism ring true for those who believe Greece’s salvation is blood kinship — in other words, Greece can only be saved if it belongs to the Greeks.
Chartsias supports Golden Dawn because it promises what other politicians do not: to cleanse the country of corruption and foreign influence, whether it is Eurocrats in Brussels or Afghan migrants looking for asylum.
Party leader Nikolaos Michaloliakos has denied the Holocaust, while party members give the Nazi salute and, according to human rights organizations, have been linked to attacks on immigrants. Foreigners are barred from Golden Dawn’s food handouts. Heavily muscled volunteers form a human chain, standing shoulder to shoulder to keep them out.
The event is run with military precision. Most volunteers are men in their 20s and 30s, dressed in fatigues; a few wear stab-resistant vests. Anyone who wants food must show police-issued identification that states the cardholder’s nationality, religion and father’s name. Identification is double-checked and personal details are collected to enter in a database. One by one, people are escorted to large piles of plastic bags filled with food. They are allowed one bag per person, a maximum of five per family.
Volunteers telephoned local families with three or more children and invited them to pick up food, says Panayodis Constantinou, 51, who joined the party a year ago. He says he owned a business selling uniforms to the army but it went bankrupt when the army didn’t pay. “They owe me 367,000 euros ($469,000),” he says. A young man approaches him and hands over 15 euros for a pair of combat fatigues.
A few metres away, Golden Dawn MP Ilias Panayiotaros is being interviewed for local television. “Greece belongs to the Greeks,” he says, as a dozen people crowd around him, applauding. He wears a black shirt emblazoned with the party’s insignia, the Greek meander, which was a common decorative motif in classical architecture but bears a likeness to the Nazi swastika. “Very soon, we will take power. We have to take care of our economy, illegal immigration and politicians who stole the money. Everything will start from zero.”
Panayiotaros is furious that the U.S. Embassy has warned American citizens of Middle Eastern, Hispanic and African descent that they could be victims of unprovoked violence because of their colour. “We have had 10 Greeks murdered by illegals, what about them?” he says. “They want to make a white country black.”
Greece does not keep race-based crime statistics but Panayiotaros, like other Golden Dawn members, are convinced minorities commit more crimes than white Greeks. The murder rate is increasing, from 1.2 for every 100,000 people in 2008 to 1.5 per 100,000 in 2010. But that is still low and comparable to Canada’s 2010 murder rate of 1.6 per 100,000 people.
The perception, however, is that deadly crime is out of control. Several people at the food handout mentions the case of Manolis Kantaris who was robbed of his video camera and killed as he got ready to take his pregnant wife to hospital in Athens in May 2011. Two Afghans were later jailed.
Chartsias agrees with Panayiotaros, and adds that immigrants are taking over the country. “Did you know the Albanians are being handed out citizenship and it’s part of the political establishment’s plot to buy votes?” There is no evidence of this. Less than 1 per cent of migrants who apply for asylum in Greece are accepted as legal refugees at first instance — never mind citizens — according to Eurostat, the European Union’s statistics agency. But people feel under siege. A recent cartoon in the Kathimerini newspaper showed a dying man crawling through a desert. Ahead was an umbrella labeled “eurogroup,” sheltering a man standing next to a water cooler. “You are heading in the right direction,” he tells the thirsty traveller. “Another 10 kilometres.”
The bailout loans — $195 billion so far — are supposed to help rescue the economy. But no one believes Greece is going in the right direction.
When the crisis began in 2008, sparked by bad loans, widespread tax evasion and a bloated public sector, Greek debt stood at $400 billion. Next year, that figure is expected to rise to $440 billion. The bailout from the so-called troika of the European Commission, International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank are only paying interest on earlier loans and recapitalizing the banks. In return, the Greek government has to push through unpopular austerity measures. The common perception is that politicians caved to the demands of foreign creditors rather than look after Greeks when they increased the retirement age from 65 to 67 and decided to fire 150,000 public sector workers by 2015.
In an interview with the German newspaper Handelsblatt, Prime Minister Antonis Samaras likened Greece’s social upheaval to Germany in the 1930s when the Nazis rose to power.
The Nazi comparison is frightening for a nation that suffered a brutal Nazi occupation and has been firmly on the left of the political spectrum since the seven-year military junta ended in 1974. The book Golden Dawn’s Black Bible, which charts the party’s emergence, is a bestseller. Its author is Greece’s premier investigative journalist, Dmitras Psaras. “The worst part of the crisis is not that people have lost jobs or income but they lost hope,” Psaras says while sipping an espresso in a downtown café. “There is no way out. The only thing they have to look forward to is revenge and voting for Golden Dawn is revenge against the system.”
When Golden Dawn MP and spokesman Ilias Kasidiaras slapped a communist colleague during a live television debate in June it boosted the party in public opinion polls. So did Kasidiaris reading out loud in parliament from the Protocols of Elders of Zion, the anti-Semitic hoax outlining a supposed plan for Jewish global domination. “Quite a few people thought when the violent side of Golden Dawn came to the surface their support would fall, but the opposite has happened,” Psaras says.
On Athens’ northern edge is the impoverished neighbourhood of Agios Panteliemonos, where Golden Dawn won 20 per cent of the vote. It is a no-go zone at night. There are running street fights between Golden Dawn supporters and migrants. Groups of black-clad men and women armed with metal bars, knives and wooden bats patrol areas like this, attacking dark-skinned migrants, according to a recent report by Human Rights Watch.
Greece is home to as many as 1 million undocumented refugees fleeing the miseries of Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Syria. For most, Greece is not a final destination, but they arrive here because the country’s porous borders offer easy access from North Africa and the Middle East. The migrants circle Greek ports looking for a chance to sneak aboard boats and trucks heading to richer European shores. But under the European Union’s Dublin II regulation, the country in which a refugee first sets foot is responsible for handling his or her asylum case. As a result, migrants who are smuggled from Greece to Germany, for example, are sent back here. But there is only one office in all of Greece processing asylum cases and it is only open for a few hours a day.
The would-be refugees end up staying in a country that neither wants them nor can afford them. In places like Agios Panteliemonos, they live 10 to 20 people in a room in dilapidated buildings and are targets of attacks. A café in the neighbourhood owned by an Afghan has blue graffiti written across the shutters: “Foreigners out.”
In the shadow of a church is Zax’s 1979 café, where retired residents are discussing the recovery of the Greek hairdresser who was stabbed several days ago and the migrant who allegedly attacked him. “He was dark-skinned,” says Georgia Papamikrouli, who is in her mid-60s. “The same night, 100 people came out and broke all the immigrants’ shops in the area, five to 10 shops. They don’t come out at night any more because Golden Dawn is coming after them,” she says, and laughs. “Local residents chase them out, too.”
Papamikrouli has lived here since 1963 and says it has become poorer and more dangerous. Although she has never been attacked, Papamikrouli is afraid to go outside at night. “It’s not enough that we are host to them but they commit crimes against us as well? What does it matter if they don’t have enough food or water?” she asks. “Many Greeks don’t have it either.”
Petty crime in Athens is increasing. In 2007, pre-crisis, there were 26,872 armed robberies, a figure that jumped to 47,607 in 2009, according to Greek police. The response by police — 40 per cent of whom support Golden Dawn, estimates Psaras — also appears to have changed. “There is a local police station here,” says Papamikrouli. “We call them and they call Golden Dawn.”
During the summer and fall’s austerity debates, up to 100,000 Greeks marched to Syntagma Square in central Athens, throwing Molotov cocktails and dodging tear gas. The Nov. 7 budget calls for $17.3 billion in government cuts over four years. Police, firefighters and judges will see their salaries slashed.
The New Democracy party of Prime Minister Samaras voted for it in coalition with the leftist Pasok and Dimar parties. It passed, but just barely: 153 voted for it in the 300-member parliament. The budget had to be approved for Greece to qualify for the next tranche of bailout money, worth $51 billion, but many Greeks didn’t like the prescribed medicine.
“There is revenge and anger and people have put Golden Dawn in parliament to take revenge on both MPs and immigrants who they think have f---ed up the country,” says Vasiliki Katrivanou, an MP with the main opposition, Syriza. Syriza voted against the austerity budget. “There is no future in austerity,” she says. “People have to choose between paying taxes or paying electricity.” With such a narrow mandate, Katrivanou says the government is shoring up its popularity by pandering to populist fears of foreigners. Recently, a Golden Dawn MP asked the education minister for the names of all immigrant children attending kindergarten and pre-school. "Instead of saying, ‘No, this is not your business,’ the minister asked the municipalities for numbers, percentages of immigrant children in their schools, and gave it to Golden Dawn,” she says. “These are children, babies.”
Golden Dawn also voted against the austerity budget because, as spokesman Ilias Kasidiaris said, it was part of the “deconstruction of Greece” so foreigners could seize its “national assets.”
Another morning in Athens, this time Attiki Square, and another food handout. Bags of spaghetti, tomatoes and milk are heaped in piles. Kasidiaris is here, trim and muscled, wearing reflective, aviator-style shades and a tight grey T-shirt. He is among three MPs who had their parliamentary immunity stripped in October by MPs. They could face trial for alleged involvement in violent attacks and robbery.
The 31-year-old denies his party is full of Nazis, then changes the subject under questioning. “These hands have never stolen from the Greeks,” he says, raising his palms. He is referring to the rampant corruption among the political establishment. “We are not doing politics the usual way. We are giving back to the people.”
With the Greek state slowly retreating — hospitals are closing, schools are running out of money — Golden Dawn uses free food to peddle simple political messages. It pays for the food in part from the 3 million euros a year in state funding it now receives as an elected political party, says Kasidiaris.
An aide hovers nearby. “You are from Canada?” he asks. “We get many phone calls of support from Greeks in Canada.” The party opened a Montreal branch earlier this year and is organizing a Christmas food drive.
Kathy Milianidou, 61, an unemployed secretary, lives with her 38-year-old son, who drives a taxi. They barely make ends meet. Her hair is scraped back into a ponytail and her pink jogging pants are dirty. “We’ll soon be so poor that we’ll be cheap labor for Europe.”
There is a theory doing the rounds this morning that the rest of Europe wants to turn Greece into a manufacturing ghetto, like China, which is why the standard monthly minimum wage of 751 euros ($972) is being cut by 22 per cent.
“This is a country that gave the world civilization,” she says blaming the crisis on the “mentality” of the “Ottoman empire” which ruled Greece until 1832. “Hopefully, the younger generation will change that. We should be like real Europeans.”
At the food handout is Matthaiopoulos Artemios, a music teacher and Golden Dawn MP who lives in Greece’s second city, Thessaloniki. Artemios, 28, has the air of a young fogey with his beard and shaggy overcoat. He once played in a band called Pogrom which wrote songs such as “Auschwitz.” He claims Athens is overrun with Africans, Arabs and Asians. "Not all, but the majority are criminals and rapists, and they are people who have repeatedly committed crimes. We have to expel those who are illegally here, which is the majority of them. It can be achieved easily if there is political will. And the only party that speaks the same language as ordinary people is Golden Dawn.”
Niki Damaskopoulou, 70, and a grandmother of six, came today for her first food handout. She is angry with politicians for cutting her pension from 727 euros per month to 500. “All the other parties are thieves and liars.” She hobbles across the square, pulling a trolley. Golden Dawn’s message that it will kick out foreigners makes sense because there will be more money to spend on Greeks, she says. “We didn’t use to be like this. Our kids have no future. I believe Golden Dawn has the solution.” She walks away, having handed over her political support for a bag of spaghetti. democracyastray