The Spartans – a new far-right party – has been described as a backchannel for a jailed neo-Nazi from the banned Golden Dawn party to exert influence. Less than three years after Greek neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn was outlawed and its leadership jailed, the far-right has made a big comeback in the country’s elections, led by one party described as Golden Dawn in disguise. The incumbent centre-right New Democracy Party easily won Sunday’s national elections with a landslide 40.5 percent of the vote. But observers were alarmed by Greek voters sending not just one, but three far-right parties into parliament, who won nearly 13 percent of the vote between them. The most successful of these parties – a previously little-known ultranationalist group called the Spartans – is widely seen as a direct descendant of the now-banned neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn. Experts fear that the party is a vehicle for one of its jailed former leaders, Ilias Kasidiaris, to continue his political project from behind bars, and that the election result could lead to the normalisation of extreme ideologies and end up influencing government policies. (…) Kasidiaris, a former Golden Dawn MP and spokesman, is currently serving a 13-year sentence alongside other members of Golden Dawn’s leadership, after they were found guilty in 2020 of directing a criminal organisation. The case was triggered by the murder of an antifascist rapper by a Golden Dawn supporter in 2013, and it officially spelled an end to the party, which had upended Greek politics by twice winning 7 percent of the vote to become the country’s third-largest political party.
via vice: The Far-Right Just Made a Shock Comeback in Greece