After murder, defections and poll defeat: the sun sets on Greece’s Golden Dawn
The neo-Nazi party’s Athens offices have shut, the removal vans have gone. Greeks embrace the end of an era of rage
For years the five-storey building at 131 Mesogeion Avenue embodied the success of Golden Dawn, the neo-Nazi party that took Greece, and Europe, by storm. Today, its tattered flag, broken signage and shuttered doors have come to tell another story: of Golden Dawn’s rise and fall on the back of rage and economic crisis, hate-mongering, murder and crime. “The people put them in, the people threw them out,” says Giorgos Mavroeidis, the manager of a health-appliance shop two stores down. “We got used to the rallies in the end but they were extremists to be sure,” he says of the black-clad staff and supporters who would frequent the building, the party’s national headquarters. “It’s strange to think of us being so close to them now.”
Related: ‘Their ideas had no place here’: how Crete kicked out Golden Dawn