When Golden Dawn entered the Greek parliament in 2012, its success seemed to mark the return of a political force that many Europeans thought had been consigned to history.
The party openly celebrated Greek nationalism, attacked migrants and leftists, and maintained a political culture deeply influenced by Nazism. Its members were involved in violent attacks across Greece, culminating in the murder of antifascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas in 2013.
Seven years later, the Greek state appeared to have defeated it.
In October 2020, after one of the most consequential political trials in modern Greek history, a court ruled that Golden Dawn operated as a criminal organisation. Most of its senior leadership was sentenced to lengthy prison terms. The party itself disappeared from parliament.
But the defeat of Golden Dawn did not mean the disappearance of the Greek far right.
Instead, its political space fragmented, and through that fragmentation new parties emerged. Former Golden Dawn figures found new ways into electoral politics and some politicians who had once occupied the margins of the Greek right moved closer to the centre of government.
Now, with the release of Golden Dawn’s former deputy leader Ilias Kasidiaris from prison and his renewed involvement in a new far-right party, the question is no longer simply whether Golden Dawn can return, but whether the political environment that allowed Golden Dawn to flourish has ever really gone away.
Golden Dawn was defeated but its politics were not necessarily erased
For years, Golden Dawn was impossible to mistake for an ordinary conservative party.
Its MPs openly expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler. In 2012, Ilias Kasidiaris physically attacked two female left-wing politicians during a live television broadcast. Outside parliament, Golden Dawn maintained networks of supporters who assaulted migrants, left-wing activists and political opponents.
The murder of Pavlos Fyssas became a turning point. Public outrage forced the Greek authorities to confront the organization more aggressively, leading to the arrests of its leadership in 2013.
The eventual 2020 verdict was historic as Golden Dawn was declared a criminal organization, and its leadership was imprisoned.
However the constituency of the Golden Dawn did not simply disappear, nor did anti-immigration politics, nationalism or distrust of Greece’s political establishment. On the contrary, the far right began to reorganise.
The far right after Golden Dawn
Since Golden Dawn’s collapse, Greece has continued to have parties operating to the right of the governing New Democracy.
Greek Solution and the ultraconservative Niki have maintained parliamentary representation, while the Spartans entered parliament in 2023 with 4.7 percent of the vote. The political space to the right of New Democracy has become crowded, even if its parties remain divided by personalities and ideology. By the end of 2024, three parties to the right of New Democracy together represented roughly one-fifth of the electorate according to Greek political reporting.
The Spartans provided perhaps the clearest demonstration that Golden Dawn’s networks had not vanished, most notably when Kasidiaris, despite being imprisoned, publicly endorsed the party in 2023 after his own political formation, the National Party–Greeks, was excluded from the election.
This strategy seemingly worked as the Spartans entered parliament.
Two years later, Greece’s Special Highest Court ruled that Kasidiaris had effectively been the party’s hidden leader and cancelled the election of three of its MPs. The ruling was extraordinary precisely because it demonstrated the limits of simply banning an individual from political activity: influence could continue through other people and another party.
Golden Dawn had disappeared as a formal organization, however, its political networks had not disappeared with it.
The harder right inside government
This is where the Greek story becomes more complicated.
It would be misleading to describe Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s New Democracy as a neo-Nazi or Golden Dawn-style party. It is a mainstream centre-right governing party and has itself supported legal measures designed to prevent convicted Golden Dawn figures from returning to parliament.
But the history of the modern Greek right is more complicated than a simple division between mainstream conservatives and extremists.
Several important figures in the New Democracy governments came from parties or political traditions further to the right. Adonis Georgiadis, Makis Voridis and Thanos Plevris all previously belonged to the Popular Orthodox Rally, or LAOS, a nationalist right-wing party that was significantly further right than traditional European Christian democracy. Voridis had earlier been involved with EPEN, a far-right organization associated with supporters of Greece’s former military dictatorship.
Their subsequent careers illustrate something important: people and ideas can move from the political margins into government without the political system itself becoming identical to the movements from which they came.
The far right has also changed its appearance
Golden Dawn’s Nazi imagery was politically toxic filled with swastikas, uniforms, street violence and open admiration for Hitler making it relatively easy for opponents to identify what it represented.
The new far right is more careful. Kasidiaris’s later political organizations have emphasized Greek nationalism, sovereignty, corruption, immigration and opposition to the political establishment with explicit Nazi symbolism largely disappearing from the public presentation. That does not erase Kasidiaris’s history, it simply changes the political packaging.
The new language is often simple and appealing: nation, borders, security, sovereignty and order, making the political boundary harder to draw.
Kasidiaris is now testing that boundary again
In September 2026, after serving roughly six years of his sentence, Kasidiaris walked out of prison to the cheers of supporters and immediately signalled his intention to return to politics.
However, he cannot simply recreate Golden Dawn and put his own name at the top of a ballot; Greek law has been specifically designed to prevent convicted leaders of criminal organizations from using new parties as vehicles for political return.
But Kasidiaris, last month demonstrated how difficult this can be to enforce when he publicly backed a new party, the Alliance of Greeks, which is connected to politicians who were elected with the Spartans in 2023.
The political experiment is therefore continuing. Can the state ban a party? Yes. Can it imprison its leaders? Yes. But can it prevent that politician from influencing voters, communicating with supporters, endorsing candidates and operating through political allies? That is evidently almost impossible, especially during trying times in Greece.
The far right does not need to become Golden Dawn again
It would be a mistake to think of the far right as a single organization that can be defeated once and for all, and this lesson applies globally, it is not an endemic problem for Greece.
Golden Dawn was one particular expression of Greek far-right politics and its collapse left behind a political market in which other parties slid into. Some were explicitly far right while others were nationalist or socially conservative. Some sought parliamentary respectability and others drew upon religious conservatism, anti-immigration politics and hostility toward the political establishment. And parts of the mainstream right moved in the same general direction on particular issues.
Unity between these parties has not been achieved and it is unlikely to happen, but something more complicated emerged; a far right spectrum. At one end of this spectrum are conventional conservatives, further along are nationalist and socially conservative parties, then come the explicitly far-right organizations and at the very end of this new echo chamber are movements such as Golden Dawn, whose leadership was ultimately convicted of running a criminal organization.
A political space that remains open
Greece therefore presents a paradox. Its courts delivered one of Europe’s most important legal defeats of a neo-Nazi organization and its government has supported measures designed to prevent convicted extremists from returning to parliament. And Golden Dawn itself no longer exists as the political force it once was.
Yet far-right parties remain part of Greek politics, and even more concerning is that former far-right activists and politicians have reached senior government positions. Furthermore, nationalist and anti-establishment rhetoric remains powerful and a convicted former Golden Dawn leader has demonstrated that imprisonment did not prevent him from influencing electoral campaigns.
The danger, then, is not necessarily that Greece will simply recreate Golden Dawn in its old form. The more plausible possibility is something subtler. A new party could abandon the swastika while retaining the nationalism. It could reject the street violence while retaining the anti-immigration politics. It could speak the language of democracy while being organized around a leader with a deeply anti-democratic political history.
That is why Kasidiaris’s return matters, it is not simply the return of one former Golden Dawn politician, it’s a test of whether the political ecosystem that once produced Golden Dawn has genuinely been dismantled, or merely reorganized.
The Greek courts defeated Golden Dawn, however Greek politics has failed on yet another dimension; to defeat the conditions that made Golden Dawn possible in the first place.
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