Omaira Gill :
So the results are in. All across Europe, the parliamentary elections were used by voters to sweep extreme right parties into power. Anti-European Union sentiment has been growing across the continent since the debt crisis hit in 2008. This weekend’s elections in 28 countries saw unprecedented gains for far-right anti-immigration and anti-EU political parties who caught the wave of voter disillusionment and rode it into local and European parliamentary positions.
In Greece, there was much shock and hand-wringing over the fact that the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn got nearly 10% of the vote. Much soul-searching was undertaken by commentators across various TV channels, wondering how much of the percentage of people that voted for Golden Dawn actually believe their ideology.
In my opinion, around 2% of the voters out of 10% are hard core neo-Nazis, 6% are in some way racist and the remaining 2% used their vote as a protest vote. Talking to friends in Athens this week, several of them tried to reconcile these figures. Can it really be that in Greece things have come to this?
I’m afraid so. The thing that Golden Dawn has managed to do which no other political party has succeeded in is in engaging the youth of Greece. Greece’s Generation Y is growing up in an economy that is so bad that they are going to be the first generation that is materially worse off than the previous one. Youth unemployment is at an unsustainable 64%.
Antonis Samaras has recently made fantastical promises of creating 870,000 jobs over the next seven years, I fail to see how these jobs are going to materialise out of thin air.
Fronted by young politicians spouting bombastic propaganda, with slogans and uniforms, the model of Golden Dawn is highly appealing to the young of Greece who are drifting aimlessly through the economic crisis.
The public in general is fed up of money grabbing politicians. Golden Dawn claim to fund all their activities themselves without dipping into public coffers, though they refuse to say where these funds come from. They offer no solutions, they only offer blame, and everyone knows that you might be able to distract from the core of an argument by piling on the blame, but you can’t eventually win an argument with that tactic.
According to Golden Dawn, immigrants and the European Union are to blame for all of Greece’s problems, and the young of Greece have latched onto this message with enthusiasm. In light of the arrests of the party’s leaders for criminal activities, in light of the party’s extreme violence to minority groups, people consciously went out and voted for them. This means that they did so knowing full well what this party stands for.
You only have to read the comments on some of the videos on Golden Dawn’s Youtube channel to understand the depth with which Greece’s Generation Y has engaged with their message. This is a ticking time bomb, and so far no one has attempted to take it seriously.
Golden Dawn, the joke of Greek politics five years ago, now have such a bad reputation that even France’s Front National has declined to form an alliance with them. This doesn’t mean that other extreme right parties that did well in the European elections won’t. The European Parliament now faces the unprecedented scenario of 140 parliamentary seats out of 751 being in the hands of the anti-Europe parties, many of them belonging to the ultra right. The only good to come out of this is that it will send a strong message to Europe’s political elite about their handling of the debt crisis. Maybe they’ll start paying more attention to the rise of racism in Europe than to the correct shape of cucumbers and potatoes.
(Omaira Gill is a freelance journalist based in Athens)
