controversial immigration ban<\/a> has sent thousands of supporters of the far-right Golden Dawn party, which represents about 10 per cent of the popular vote and is the country’s third-largest party, onto the streets. They have staged torchlight parades and called for copycat bans for Greece, which is still struggling to cope with a year-long refugee crisis.
\n\u201cTrump\u2019s policies have given us a new wind of support,\u201d Elias Panagiotaros, a leading light of the far-right party and an MP in Athens, told The Independent. \u201cIt\u2019s validating and reinforcing our nationalistic and patriotic policies \u2013 policies that we have been advocating for years.<\/p>\n\u201cWe should follow Trump\u2019s beat,\u201d he said. \u201cWe shouldn\u2019t leave Greece like an open field for migrants to come and go as they want. We should reclaim our country and our interests and put them first, just like Trump.\u201d
\nGolden Dawn supporters marched through the streets of Athens at the weekend, ostensibly to commemorate the deaths of three Greek military officers in a helicopter crash near the Imia islets, at the Greek-Turkish sea border, on 31 January 1996.
\nWaving torches and the party\u2019s red-and-black flag \u2013 a colour scheme closely resembling that of Hitler\u2019s Nazi party \u2013 the group chanted anti-Turkish and anti-migrant slogans and its members spoke out against the \u201ctens of thousands of illegal immigrants in our country\u201d.<\/p>\n
Police said about 800 people were involved in the Golden Dawn march. A counter-protest organised by Greek anti-fascists also took place in another part of the city at the time, although authorities said they were kept apart and there were no clashes.
\nThe march \u2013 and its heated rhetoric \u2013 signal an eerie resurgence for Golden Dawn, a once fringe and negligible political force that emerged from obscurity three years ago to gain national representation in Greece\u2019s 300-seat parliament.
\nFeeding on the country\u2019s financial crisis and popular resentment of traditional mainstream parties, the neo-Nazi grouping, regarded as being among the most dangerous reactionaries in Europe, saw its support rise before swooning amid allegations of it orchestrated the killings of leftist hip-hop artists in Athens two years ago.
\n\u201cSince then,\u201d Mr Panagiotaros said, \u201cwe\u2019ve become grounded.\u201d He said the group nonetheless remained \u201cvigilant\u201d and \u201csilent\u201d, watching on the sidelines of a lingering refugee crisis that has seen more than a million undocumented migrants pass through Greece on their way to seeking asylum in other parts of Europe, at times unsettling the country and unnerving its people.<\/p>\n
Although 62,000 migrants remain trapped in the country because of a flurry of border closures in the Balkans last year, Greece has seen only scarce streaks of racist violence. Still, anti-immigrant feeling is on the rise, and that, says Mr Panagiotaros \u201cwill pick up as Trump presses ahead with anti-immigration policies.\u201d
\n\u201cIt\u2019s simple,\u201d the Golden Dawn politician said. \u201cTrump is the planet\u2019s keeper. He\u2019s the president of the world\u2019s superpower, and whether you like him or not, his policies are now validating beliefs and concerns across the globe.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Anthee Carassava Source: The Independent Greece\u2019s most prominent neo-Nazi movement says it has found a new surge in support following Donald Trump\u2019s election as US President, and that his ban on travellers from some Muslim-majority countries \u201cvalidates\u201d the group\u2019s far-right views. Stirring a hardline, nationalistic element in Greece, the new President\u2019s controversial immigration ban […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2688,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-media-en"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/goldendawnwatch.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/goldendawnwatch.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/goldendawnwatch.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/goldendawnwatch.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/goldendawnwatch.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2686"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/goldendawnwatch.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2686\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2794,"href":"https:\/\/goldendawnwatch.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2686\/revisions\/2794"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/goldendawnwatch.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2688"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/goldendawnwatch.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/goldendawnwatch.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/goldendawnwatch.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}