Greek Golden Dawn deputies stripped of immunity

(Vatican Radio) A majority of the Greek Parliament today voted to lift parliamentary immunity for four deputies of the far-right Golden Dawn party. The vote is part of a government campaign to quash Golden Dawn as a neo-Nazi criminal organization.

The vote was a foregone conclusion, as it was an open roll-call vote. This triggered sharp criticism from Golden Dawn as a violation of democratic procedure, and one more indication of a political pogrom against the party.

Golden Dawn has technically 18 members in the 300-seat Greek Parliament, though four are now in detention pending trial on charges of aiding and abetting violence. They include the Golden Dawn leader, Nikos Michaloliakos.

It’s still uncertain at this point whether Golden Dawn can be expelled from the Parliament. Much will depend on how Greece’s Supreme Court rules later in the week on the charge that Golden Dawn is a criminal rather than a political organization.

Such a ruling, though, could be the start of a slippery slope. The leftwing Syriza party, which is the country’s second largest, fears that if one legitimate party can be eliminated from politics, then in the future it might well be the turn of others.

The latest polls suggest that Golden Dawn’s popularity has been somewhat dented by the spate of negative publicity over the past month. Yet it remains Greece’s third largest party, with just under 10 percent. That’s unlikely to dip as long as many Greeks blame the old political class for the seemingly endless gut-wrenching economic crisis, and lean towards radical solutions. Listen to this report by John Carr in Athens