On February 6th, 20 people in person and 50 on zoom attended the Modern Greek and Hellenic Studies Department’s lecture hosted by Prof. Philliou on the ‘Regional Component of the far-right vote: an insight from rural Greece’. The speaker of this conference was Sofia Tipaldou, a Fulbright visiting scholar from the Pantheion University of Athens.
Her presentation began with the political and historical context in Greece that led to the rise in popularity of ‘Χρυσή Αυγή’ (Golden Dawn), the far-right movement created in the 1930s that ended up gaining seats in the Greek Parliament in 2010. Amidst the Greek financial crisis and subsequent refugee crisis, the party was re-elected in 2015 and remained in Parliament until it was declared a criminal organization in 2020 by Greek court.
Tipaldou affirms that previous scholarly work has shown that the rise in immigration and economic concern hold causal relations with the rise in far-right popularity. However, Tipaldou herself has studied two rural regions of Greece, Argolia and Lakonia, that seem to have been big supporters of ‘Golden Dawn’ and yet are not characterized by high levels of unemployment or arrivals of migrants. As such, she concentrates on these regional scales to understand the factors at play behind the rise of far-right parties in Greece.
By asking the far-right voters of these regions specific questions, Tipaldou understood that most of them claim to be predominantly concerned by immigration because of fear that they pose a threat to their traditional culture and subsequently expressed Islamophobic sentiment. However, many had already been voting for Golden Dawn before the refugee crisis, leading Sofia Tipaldou to dig deeper into what other factors could be at play. She found that many were still strongly marked by the legacies of the Greek Civil War which played a pivotal role in their voting preferences.
In addition, Tipaldou found voting preferences linked to Greek visions of the Turkish threat, Greek visions of Western Europe, a Greek ‘superiority syndrome’ and she also detected that many people who voted in favor of Golden Dawn did not do so out of ideological support, but out of protest against the European Union. As such, she used her study to show that historical legacies and a coexistence between an inferiority and superiority syndrome could be important points in understanding the increase of far-right voting in specific areas.