For the second time in two months, the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party has backed down from Athens Mayor George Kaminis who banned them from conducting another Greeks-only food handout and soup kitchen in a public square in the city on July 24.
After vowing to go ahead this time, the extremists changed their mind after Public Order Minister Nikos Dendias said he’d send in the police to block them, calling Golden Dawn a “pathetic copy of Nazi totalitarianism.”
The party decided to once again shift the handout to its own headquarters. Kaminis, who was attacked in May by Golden Dawn MP Giorgos Germenis after banning the first operation, said there was no way the second one would proceed either, castigating it as an event which he said “consciously promotes racism and xenophobia.”
Golden Dawn insisted that its plans for a handout were “100 percent legal” as it had informed authorities and that it would go ahead with the event. The party said that all its MPs and leader, Nikos Michaloliakos, would be at the event.
Golden Dawn won 18 seats in the Parliament last year with 6.97 percent of the vote and has risen as high as 13 percent in some recent polls on the back of an agenda that is anti-immigrant, anti-gay, anti-Capitalist, anti-American, anti-European and promotes Greece for Greeks only.
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