Violence and Extreme-right Activism: The Neo-Nazi Golden Dawn in a Greek Rural Community

ABSTRACT

After years of marginal appeal in the electorate, Golden Dawn (GD), a hitherto minor grupuscule of the neo-fascist right, has experienced impressive and continuous electoral success in Greece since 2010. Ιn this paper, we focus on the micro-scale of local communities and explore how violence is used by a local activist in ways that attract sympathisers to GD. Employing ethnographic research in a rural community we observe an everyday rhetoric that gives GD a privileged position in the circulation of violence. We argue that, rather than being a collateral symptom of neo-fascist mobilisation, violence may under certain conditions be one of the strengths of extreme-right movements.

KEYWORDS:

• Far right
• neo-fascism
• racism
• nationalism
• activism
• migration
• political violence
• Golden Dawn
• rural
• Greece

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank A. Afouxenidis and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable critical comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Michalis Petrou is a Research Fellow at the National Centre for Social Research, Athens. He holds a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology (Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens, 2005). His research interests and publications focus on anthropological approach to rural space and rural–urban relationships, particularly on the socioeconomic changes, multifunctionality and socio-spatial recomposition, social mobilities, migration movements, identity and cultural renegotiations of social actors, and social conflicts in local government.

George Kandylis is a Research Fellow at the National Centre for Social Research, Athens. Trained in political sciences and urban geography, he has mainly worked in research on contemporary immigration and its impact on urbanisation processes in Greece. His areas of interest include social segregation, spatial mobility, racism and securitisation in the Greek cities.

Notes

1. From the official website of GD.

2. The distinction between parties and movements is beyond the scope of this article. Although there can be parties not based on movements and movements with no party organization, GD is a typical case where the establishment of both forms is consistently pursued.

3. This is not the place for a comprehensive typology of the extreme-right family. We do not suggest that every extreme-right movement falls into the neo-fascist category but we would agree with Hainsworth (2008: 12) that ‘the liberal-democratic, systemic affection and attachment of such movements should not be exaggerated, for basically they want another political system, another value system’.

4. The names of our informants have been changed to protect their anonymity.

5. The original source seems to be Stochos, a newspaper traditionally connected with extreme-right organizations. Similar posts appeared in web media. There can be no concrete claim that the circulation of the alleged crime was disseminated by GD after some ‘official’ decision to do so. However, what interests us here is the circulation and the use of the story at the local level.

6. Leader of the dictatorial regime established in August 1936.

7. He refers to the on-air physical attack to a female MP of the Communist Party by one GD MP in 2012.

8. We owe this formulation to Kostas Vakalopoulos with whom we co-authored an earlier account of this research.

9. See note 7.