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Elias Panagiotaros on Russian television last year. Photo: Screengrab/RT
London: Resentment against the growing numbers of asylum seekers crossing Greece's borders has helped solidify far-right Golden Dawn as the third force in the country's politics, one of its MPs says.
Elias Panagiotaros, who infamously described Hitler as a "great personality" in an interview last year, also claimed his party was the country's only true anti-austerity party, after Syriza signed a memorandum of agreement with Brussels earlier this year.
Nikos Michaloliakos, leader of Golden Dawn, salutes his supporters during a pre-election rally in Athens last week. Photo: AP
The neo-fascist Golden Dawn won 7 per cent of the vote on the weekend, behind Syriza and the conservative New Democracy – up from 6.3 per cent in the January election.
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It scored more than 10 per cent of the vote on the island of Kos, where tens of thousands of asylum seekers have arrived from Turkey since the beginning of the year. That was double Golden Dawn's vote share from January – and there was a similar pattern on Lesbos, Samos and Symi, other islands on the front line of the refugee crisis.
"We have a lot of serious problems," Mr Panagiotaros told Fairfax Media.
A protester wearing a Golden Dawn T-shirt, next to a swastika flag in Brisbane, Australia. Photo: Naz Mulla/File
"We have a huge problem with an illegal invasion. Golden Dawn is saying this, we are not afraid of saying things that others want to say but they are afraid of not being politically correct.
"If we want to call ourselves a sovereign country we must patrol our borders. We must have sealed borders. Tourists, businessmen and students may come. No one else."
It did not matter that most of the migrants were just passing through the country, he said.
Supporters of the extreme far-right Golden Dawn party wave Greek flags in Athens last week. Photo: AP
"We don't care if they don't want to stay. We don't want them to pass through Greece. There will be millions next year. We have our own problems to deal with."
His party won 18 of the parliament's 300 seats, one more than last time, after running on a fear campaign that played to the "threat"Â of losing the country to foreigners.
One TV spot featured three children who, over tinkling piano, said: "I want to have a job when I grow up ... I don't want to become a minority in my country. We want Greece to belong to the Greeks!"
It promised expulsion of all "illegal immigrants" and one ad even ominously promised "national planning for a solution to the demographic problem so we don't become a minority in our own country".
The party also campaigned against austerity, using clips from Game of Thrones to paint austerity as a "winter is coming" scenario.
​Yanis Varoufakis, Syriza's former outspoken finance minister, warned in July that far-right groups would thrive under austerity.
The "10 Nazis" of Golden Dawn would "inherit the mantle of the anti-austerity drive", he said.
Mr Panagiotaros said Syriza's "U-turn" on austerity had disappointed voters – this was clear in the more than 40 per cent of voters who did not bother to cast a vote.
"Things are going to be extra rough for Greek society now," he said. "There will be huge taxes for everything."
In addition to the eastern border islands, Golden Dawn drew increased support from Greece's unemployed in the poorer suburbs of Athens.
In absolute terms Golden Dawn saw a small fall in support, with about 380,000 votes compared with 388,000 in January, however it was smaller than the fall in support for the other main parties.