Crackdown on Hellenes and its Golden Dawn leader Ilias Kasidiaris could cause more problems than it solves

For two years Ilias Kasidiaris, a convicted leader of the now disbanded neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party, has used social media to address supporters from Domokos prison in central Greece.

Month after month the former MP has railed against the inability of the “corrupt political regime” to govern the country in a stream of hate-filled speeches. For his 134,000 subscribers on YouTube, the exhortations are a lifeline to Kasidiaris and the Hellenes, the small nationalist party he set up shortly before being handed a 13-and-a-half-year prison term for his role in Golden Dawn. And they seem to be paying off.

MPs from Greece’s neo-Nazi organisation return to court 18 months after original criminal convictions

The imprisoned protagonists of Greece’s once powerful neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party will seek to overturn prolonged prison terms in an appeals court trial due to open amid anti-fascist protests in Athens this week.

Eighteen months after members were convicted of operating a criminal organisation that masqueraded as a political party, appellate judges will start hearing the case afresh on Wednesday.

Extremist party’s demise has left a gap that it is being filled by far-right groups in north of the country

“They were big and brawny and struck like a thunderbolt,” says Aphrodite Frangou, an activist and leftwing journalist recalling the moment a group of far-right Golden Dawn sympathisers went on the attack. “They kicked us and punched us and broke everything, tables, chairs, even the loudspeakers we had set up. Four of us spent the night in hospital.”

October was meant to be a month of celebration for Frangou and other members of Keerfa, Greece’s pre-eminent anti-fascist movement.

Christos Pappas was last of far-right group’s cadres to evade justice after dozens of operatives jailed last year

The far-right extremist long regarded as Golden Dawn’s chief ideologue has been placed behind bars after nine months on the run, starting a 13-year prison sentence handed down by a Greek court in October.

Flushed out of his lair – a flat where he had been hiding in Athens – Christos Pappas, the now-defunct group’s deputy leader, was driven in a whirl of sirens on Friday from police headquarters to the courts and then on to jail in central Greece.

Former leader of neo-Nazi party convicted in absentia in 2020 faces extradition to Athens

When the authorities caught up with Ioannis Lagos, they caught up with him fast. The MEP, once a feared leader of Greece’s neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party, has been arrested hours after he was stripped of his immunity as an elected member of the European parliament and told he would be extradited to Athens.

Seized in his Brussels home on Tuesday, the convicted lawmaker had been sentenced to 13 years after a Greek court determined at the end of a landmark trial in 2020 that Golden Dawn was a criminal organisation masquerading as a political party.

Greek neo-Nazi ideologue Christos Pappas will not turn himself in, says lawyer

Greek authorities have been forced to acknowledge that the neo-Nazi ideologue behind Golden Dawn’s unhindered embrace of national socialism has evaded arrest as other members of the extremist group headed to prison.

In an admission that is likely to raise embarrassing questions, police said on Friday they had been unable to find Christos Pappas, the party’s de-facto number two.

Leaders of violent far-right group, including former MPs, shown little leniency by judges

The neo-Nazi leaders of Golden Dawn have each been sentenced to 13 years in prison by a court in Athens, at the end of a historic hearing.

The neo-fascist group was officially laid to rest as its disgraced former MPs were shown little mercy by a three-member panel of judges. Last week the court ruled that Golden Dawn lawmakers had operated a criminal organisation under the guise of being a democratically elected party.

Ex-leader and MPs found guilty after biggest trial of fascists since Nuremberg

A court verdict in Athens with ramifications for the far right across Europe has been met with jubilation in Greece and internationally after judges ruled the neo-fascist Golden Dawn was a criminal organisation in disguise.

Tens of thousands people who had converged near the heavily guarded court complex in Athens in anticipation of the judgment roared in excitement as the news emerged. Many broke into spontaneous applause and punched the air as it became clear that the three-member tribunal had found the far-right group guilty of operating a gang of hit squads bent on eliminating perceived enemies.

The neo-Nazi party’s Athens offices have downsized and it has closed offices across the country. 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 criminal charges. “The people put them in, the people threw them out,” quips 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