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A marginal racist organization, Golden Dawn, managed to attract first the votes of almost one out of 14 Greek voters and then global media and public attention. How did an extreme right groupuscule invade the political terrain of an EU-10 member state? Existing attempts to account for this phenomenon point to demand-side explanations, related to the political turmoil that followed the notorious debt crisis and the accompanying austerity measures. These explanations, however, fail to account for the genesis of this trajectory. We delve into this exact question, focusing on the election that marked the emergence of the Golden Dawn and permitted further electoral penetration. Combining qualitative and quantitative methods, we show that the party took advantage of favourable political circumstances developing a grassroots network of protection that helped it enter the central political arena.

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Anti-establishment parties with either a left-wing or a right-wing ideological slant have been entering contemporary European Democracies with sizeable vote shares. During the Great Recession, the Greek party system could be perceived as a relevant case-study for the formation and breakthrough of anti-establishment parties. Given the fact that two deeply ideologically diverging anti-establishment parties, the Coalition of the Radical Left – Social Unionist Front (syriza) and the populist radical right-wing Independent Greeks (anel), came to power, forming a coalition government from early 2015 to January 2019, the primary goal of this article is to enquire into ‘supply-side’ parameters, exploring potential associations along a range of programmatic stances and policy dimensions that effectuated the syriza-anel alliance. Using the Comparative Manifesto Project and the Chapel Hill Expert Survey datasets from 2012 to 2017, our findings confirm beyond the expected programmatic differences the existence of a converging policymaking basis between syriza and anel which goes beyond the ‘pro-Memorandum vs. anti-Memorandum’ divide.