A Greek appeals court on Wednesday confirmed the 2020 convictions of leaders and associates of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party, rejecting appeals against sentences that followed a long criminal investigation and trial.
In 2020, a court ruled that Golden Dawn operated as a criminal organization while presenting itself as a political party. That decision came after a five-year trial which resulted in convictions for the party’s leader, Nikos Michaloliakos, and other senior figures for running and participating in the criminal organization. Michaloliakos, a Holocaust denier, was among those found guilty.
A five-judge panel at the Criminal Appeal Court in Athens issued a unanimous ruling, upholding the convictions of 42 Golden Dawn members and associates who had sought to overturn their sentences. Michaloliakos, now 68, was sentenced in 2020 to 13 years in prison; he was released on parole last year on health grounds.
Greece’s conservative Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis welcomed the ruling in parliament, saying it concerns a “traumatic chapter” in the country’s parliamentary life that he hopes can now be left behind.
The convictions followed heightened scrutiny of Golden Dawn after the 2013 murder of anti-fascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas. The party member who stabbed Fyssas was convicted of murder in 2020; the appeals court on Wednesday also upheld that conviction.
Background: Golden Dawn began as a neo-Nazi organization in the 1980s and gained significant support during Greece’s financial crisis, winning parliamentary seats between 2012 and 2019. The party attracted voters with an anti-austerity, anti-immigrant platform and became the country’s third-most popular party at the height of the crisis before its legal collapse.