The criminalization of the neo-Nazi group Golden Dawn in October 2020 was a watershed moment in the political turmoil that has enveloped Greece over the last decade. The party’s dramatic electoral collapse — marked, already before the ban, by its failure to elect any MPs in the 2019 general election — fed a powerful ideological narrative claiming that the crisis was now over and that Greece was “back to normal.” Golden Dawn’s conviction was praised emphatically by the political establishment and corporate media alike.

Yet there was something puzzling in all this. Key figures from Greece’s main parties, including the ruling New Democracy, had for years maintained direct relations with Golden Dawn. Indeed, when the party was at its peak, mainstream media showed a conspicuous tolerance toward its anti-immigrant rhetoric and even violent actions. Yet now the emerging establishment consensus explicitly terms Golden Dawn a Nazi party steeped in criminal practices.

This condemnation has, however, taken a rather particular form, associating the neo-Nazi party with a generic extremism rather than investigating its real roots. The epithet “populist” (standing in place of “far-right”) gave life to a popular version of horseshoe theory, attacking also the Left. This meant obfuscating this criminal organization’s ideological origins: a litany of aggressive nationalism, racism, sexism, homophobia, and antisemitism, typical of the contemporary far right internationally.