Greek Neo-Nazi Party Member Assaults Opposition Candidate on Live TV

It’s no secret that the next round of the Greek parliamentary elections are getting ugly. The country is debating leaving the Eurozone and has narrowly avoided default in the last few months by some pretty close margins. The last round of elections saw both far-Right and far-Left parties gaining footholds in Parliament, which is never the basis for compromise and reform (see Tea Party, The).

This is taking it to another level, however. Golden Dawn party member Ilias Kasidiaris, 31, apparently took umbrage to being called a ‘facist’ by Communist Party member Liana Kanelli. 

What really escalated it, however, was a comment by another woman on the show, the far-left’s Rena Dourou, said of Golden Dawn and Kasidiaris, ‘(there is a) crisis of democracy when people who will take the country back 500 years have got into the Greek Parliament’. I don’t need to describe what happened, it’s pretty clearly displayed in the video above.

It should go without saying that there’s no place for this in a civilized society-even a society where there are significant concerns about unemployment, immigration and the country’s financial future. Slapping an older woman on TV isn’t going to do much for the image of a party that’s been accused of being Neo-Nazi and of leading attacks on immigrants throughout Greece.

I worry, though, that there’s something telling about how things have deteriorated in Greece. In the last round of Parliamentary elections, Golden Dawn received 7% of the vote. Compare that to the previous round of elections in 2009, when the party received only .31% of the vote.

Fear leads people to do extreme things and take extreme positions. We’ve seen the seeds of that here in America, as we’ve elected officials who show no compunction about questioning the lawfully elected President’s citizenship or interrupting him during a planned speech to Congress. We’re still a long way from Greece-both financially and in regards to incidents like this, but as the rhetoric around the campaigns ticks up this summer, it is worth wondering how much further down the rabbit hole we can go.

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