The government has prepared a bill to ban voting for the Kasidiaris party

The government’s amendment to ban convicted politician Ilias Kasidiaris from participating in national elections has been submitted to parliament. The amendment is expected to be discussed and voted on in the plenary session of Parliament next Tuesday.

As we reported previously, Ilias Kasidiaris was not only able to found a new political party, but also to run a fairly successful election campaign from the maximum security prison Domokos. How he did it, the authorities do not know. It is known that in 2021, Kasidiaris spoke on political topics with his lawyer. This became known to the prison administration, after which the Domokos prison council decided to control the prisoner’s telephone connection.

Kasidiaris was allowed to communicate only with relatives and lawyers on personal and family matters. In case of violation of the measures, it was decided to immediately stop communication, notify the manager and conduct a disciplinary review.

SYRIZA-PS is reportedly sticking to its own version of the amendment, which was presented some time ago, because the main opposition believes that the amendment proposed by the government is too dangerous. KKE also says no, while PASOK-KINAL, like Hellenic Solution, are undecided. The MPA25 expressed its opposition from the outset and is waiting for the text of the amendment to take its position. The government sent the text of the amendment to the Supreme Court, not to the plenary session, as it fears that the ruling will be declared unconstitutional.

Recall that SYRIZA-PS from the very beginning warned about the unconstitutionality of some aspects of the resolution and the danger that its wording, implicit for the far right, could become the government’s “back door”, used for a broader interpretation and equated Nazism with any other political ideology. An example of such actions can be the decisions of the parliaments of the Baltic republics and Ukraine, where the left parties, primarily the communists, were equated with the Nazis.

It is worth noting that both left-wing parties and the New Democracy, which positions itself as centrists, are afraid of the resurgence of an ultra-right party like Chrysi Avgi. The problems of the main political forces in Greece are that the main part of the country’s population has become disillusioned with the politicians who are or have been in power for the past few decades. It was this reason that led to the appearance of Chrysi Avgi on the political arena, and also allowed this party to gain a fairly large number of votes in parliament in the mid-10s (6.5%). Nevertheless, with the help of behind-the-scenes manipulations, the party was able to get a ride in the 2019 parliamentary elections, and in 2020 it was completely declared a criminal organization. After that, the entire political leadership of the party was condemned, on a very strained pretext, to terms from 12 to 16 years of strict regime.

The decision appears to have helped little, as despite the restrictions, the convicted far-right party leader has 122,000 followers on YouTube, his main campaign tool, and another 35,000 on Twitter and other platforms.

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