The Golden Dawn of austerity

The three parties in Greece’s uneasy coalition government are paying a high price for their unremitting support of more austerity measures, with polls showing the ruling New Democracy Conservatives have fallen behind the major opposition Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA) and that the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party is surging fast while the once-dominant PASOK Leftists have fallen to last place among the six parties in Parliament.

On the same day that 70,000 Greeks were demonstrating in Athens against more pay cuts, tax hikes and slashed pensions being planned by the government of Prime Minister Antonis Samaras, a poll by the survey company VPRC put SYRIZA first with 30.5 percent, compared to 27 percent for New Democracy.

Golden Dawn, which got only 0.29 percent of the vote in 2009 when it was considered an extremist fringe party, is now in third with 14 percent, double what it received in June when it won 18 seats in the Parliament.

As Golden Dawn presses its anti-immigrant, anti-gay, anti-Semitic, anti-bailout, ultra-religious platform it is gaining with each extreme move, the poll indicated. The party is also benefiting from its fierce opposition to austerity measures that are attached to $325 billion in rescue loans from the Troika of the European Union-International Monetary Fund-European Central Bank.

The biggest surprise, however, was the 5.5 percent given to PASOK, less than half the 12.3 percent it won in June. The party had 44 percent of the vote in the 2009 elections which it won, but is disappearing after former premier George Papandreou’s regime imposed austerity, which is still being backed by its new leader, Evangelos Venizelos.