The political party was founded by a former member of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn, who is serving a long prison sentence. This Tuesday the Greek Supreme Court banned his presentation in the general elections of May 21, we learned from a judicial source. Ilias Kassidiaris, former spokesperson for Golden Dawn and leader of the far-right Les Hellènes party, will not be able to stand as a candidate, as he aspired to do, in the election to be held in less than three weeks.
From his prison cell, this former deputy of the neo-Nazi party from 2012 to 2019 had recently announced his intention to run for a seat as a deputy in the Athens center constituency. The judgment of the assembly of the Supreme Court, announced by its president, Altan Kokovou, was taken with a large majority of 9 against 1 of the magistrates of this institution.
A historic decision
The banning of a party from elections is the first since the restoration of democracy in Greece in 1974 after the seven-year term of the colonels’ dictatorship, according to experts. In February, Parliament blocked the Les Hellènes party by adopting an amendment to the 2021 electoral law, which provides that a political party cannot participate in the elections if its official or unofficial leadership has been convicted of belonging to a criminal organization.
The final decision then rests with the Supreme Court. Already before this ban, Ilias Kassidiaris, who had created his own training a few months before his imprisonment in October 2020, had denounced “an unimaginable coup against democracy” by trying to keep out of the vote “hundreds of thousands of voters” of his party.