Greece’s Supreme Court rules out Kasidiaris’s party in elections

The Greek Supreme Court has excluded the far-right party of convicted Golden Dawn member Ilias Kasidiaris from the May 21 general election. This party is one of the fourteen excluded from the elections.

By a majority vote of 9 to 1, the judges ruled that the party “Έλληνες“ (Greeks) is the heir of the Golden Dawn, because, in addition to the condemned Casidiaris, other candidates have been identified who have allied with “criminal organization”.

This is one of the rare cases where the Supreme Court “excludes” a political party for indirect rather than formal reasons, which constitutionalists say is a violation of the Greek constitution.

On the other hand, the EAN political party, led by a close associate of Kasidiaris and former vice-president of the Supreme Court, Anastasios Kanellopoulos, will participate in the elections, as we expected.

In his first testimony from prison convicted a member of the Golden Dawn (Chrisi Avgi) said that “tonight the democratic state is finally overthrown, and half a million Greeks are deprived of the supreme right to vote for the party of their choice.”

It is worth recalling that in the 2015 elections, “XA” won almost half a million votes, but this did not help it in 2019, when, with the help of electoral technologies, the party was “rolled” in the elections, and then, by a court decision, was recognized as a criminal organization and all of its leaders were sentenced to maximum prison terms.

As a first reaction, the socialist PASOK-KINAL recalled that they were the first to submit a memorandum to the Supreme Court against the participation of the Kasidiaris formation in the elections and were the only party that submitted to the court “the methods of Kanellopulo-Kassidiaris, so that, if necessary, it could be considered that the party EAN should also be excluded.”

14 parties excluded from elections

The judges of the Supreme Court suspended a total of 14 parties from participation in the elections:

ΠΑΤΡΙΩΤΙΚΗ ΕΝΩΣΗ “ΕΛ.ΛΑ.Σ” -ΕΛΛ. AT ΟΜΜΑ (Λ.ΕΥ.ΚΟ), ΕΛΛΗΝΕΣ, ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΟ ΛΕΥΚΟ ΚΙΝΗΜΑ ΣΗΜΕΡΙΝΗΣ ΙΔΕΟΛΟΓΙΑΣ (Ε . ; Πρόδρομος – Εμφιετζ όγλου, Πατρίδα – Αφροδίτη Λατινοπουλου, Πράσινο και Μωβ, Μαζί.

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