Greece gives birth to another virulent neo-Nazi party — is the U.S. ambassador one of its proud godfathers?

by ANDREW LEE

**Ilias Kasidiaris posing in the center alongside other GD members with a Nazi Wehrmacht flag during the Winter Solstice in Greece. (December 21, 2012.)** PHOTO/efsyn.gr

“Greeks for the Fatherland:” Ilias Kasidiaris and Greece’s New Far-Right Party

A new neo-Nazi party, “Greeks for the Fatherland,” has formed in Greece under the leadership of former Golden Dawn (GD) leader Ilias Kasidiaris as the infamous GD Party begins to fade.

Serious fissures in GD began in July 2019 when GD failed to enter the Greek parliament in elections. At the time, Ioannis Lagos, a former Member of the European Parliament, left the party and went over to the far-right ELASYN[1] party.

This trial is still ongoing and has been repeatedly subjected to delays in part because of the legal strategy of the GD, and because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Under the current unfavorable circumstances, a former MP from GD, Ilias Kasidiaris, demonstrated his ambitions by calling for an open assembly of GD in 2020 in an effort to restructure the organization and take it over. Despite the failure of his attempted intra-party coup, he was the only modestly successful GD candidate in the municipal elections of 2019; as a candidate for mayor of Athens, he came in 4th with a remarkable 10.54% of the vote.^[2]

Who is Ilias Kasidiaris?

Kasidiaris was born in Athens in 1980 and possesses a degree from the Agricultural University of Athens. During his military service he was stationed in Chios island in the Special Forces 1^st Raider Amphibious Brigade. He has been one of the longest-term members of GD despite his young age. In 2007 he was part of an infamous “Attack Battalion” of GD against university students but in the subsequent trial of this attack in 2013, he was acquitted of the assault charges. As a member of the “Old Guard” of GD, he was training the paramilitary structures of the party beginning in 2002 and has participated in meetings with the German neo-Nazis of the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) in various festivals, such as the 2005 “Rock for the Fatherland” underground festival in Athens.[3] Since then he has written many articles defending Adolf Hitler and Nazism. He is also a Holocaust denier. During his tenure as MP in the Greek Parliament, he read fragments into the record of the fake “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” thus exposing his anti-Semitism.[4]

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