ABSTRACT
The Greek extreme right has largely escaped the avalanche of academic interest on the European extreme right. Apart from a few articles (Dimitras 1992; Kapetanyannis 1995) and some brief references in the international literature (e.g. Ignazi 2003; Mudde 2007), little is known about the multiple extreme-right groupings that competed in Greek elections in the past three decades (but see Kolovos 2005). Given the voluminous literature on the extreme right, this scholarly indifference might be somewhat surprising, but a quick glance at the electoral record aptly explains it. For, apart from a brief electoral spurt in 1977, the extreme right has failed to make a mark on the Greek electoral landscape, receiving less than 2 per cent in all subsequent national legislative elections until 2004. Some of the most authoritative studies on the extreme right have attributed the marginality of the Greek extreme right to a developmental ‘lag’ of recent Mediterranean democracies (Kitschelt 1995) and to the bitter memories of authoritarianism (Ignazi 2003). Indeed, until recently these analyses went some way to accounting for the failure of the Greek extreme right. But the recent advances of the extreme-right Popular Orthodox Rally (LAOS) create the need to re-examine the conventional wisdom.
