Μake us preferred on Google Parliament was set to spend Tuesday debating an Interior Ministry bill on changes to the civil service. However, the release of former Golden Dawn MP Ilias Kasidiaris from Domokos prison, and the subsequent “show” that was staged outside the jail, with the convicted far right politician describing himself as a political prisoner and announcing his return to Greek politics while his supporters waved Greek flags, upended the debate for a while.
PASOK lawmaker says the law leaves no room for debate
Panagiotis Doudonis, a PASOK lawmaker and constitutional law scholar, took a different tack, arguing the entire public debate over whether Kasidiaris can run is unnecessary because Greek election law has already settled the question. He pointed to Article 32 of the country’s electoral legislation, saying it bars Kasidiaris from running either as a party’s formal leader or as its hidden leader, while another subsection of the same article bars him from standing even as an ordinary party candidate for Parliament.
Doudonis questioned the motives of those keeping the issue in the headlines, asking whether the continued media attention reflected genuine uncertainty or something more calculated.
Koutsoumbas accuses the government of exploiting the moment
Dimitris Koutsoumbas, general secretary of the Greek Communist Party, KKE, used his floor speech to accuse the governing New Democracy party of leaning on what he called the ahistorical theory of the two extremes, a framing that treats the far right and the far left as equally dangerous to democracy. He argued that relying on this theory exposes the government’s hypocrisy: it claims to want to confront fascist forces, yet the theory itself, by drawing a false equivalence between the far right and the left, ends up shielding and nourishing those same fascist forces, according to Koutsoumbas.
Turning to Kasidiaris specifically, whom he called a “criminal Nazi”, Koutsoumbas said the day’s events showed the contradiction at the heart of such anti systemic figures. They are inflated by the very political system they claim to oppose and then are used by it for other ends. He concluded that the government’s handling of the release amounted to a deliberate strategy, a communications distraction from other issues.
New Left warns against normalizing Golden Dawn’s legacy
The party Nea Aristera, issued a statement stating that Kasidiaris’s release from prison should not be read as any form of political vindication, nor should it allow Golden Dawn’s criminal record to fade from public memory. The party said the history of the organization and its leading figures would not be erased simply because its members traded old symbols for new ones.
The statement said Kasidiaris’s attempt to return to politics shows that Greece still has not dealt with its far right problem. Neo Nazis can disguise themselves under new names, symbols and parties, the statement said, but their underlying commitment to racism, authoritarianism, violence and the exploitation of patriotism for political gain has not changed.
Nea Aristera also directed criticism at Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s government, accusing it of watching Kasidiaris’s comeback unfold while washing its hands of any responsibility. The party said the government downplays the matter as a narrow legal issue, even as it adopts far right language and rhetoric that helps cultivate the political ground on which such a comeback becomes possible. Nea Aristera also accused the government of exploiting rivalries within Greece’s far right camp to limit its own losses at the ballot box. It closed with a blunt rejection of any legitimization, whitewashing or normalization of Golden Dawn’s politics.
