[MGSA-L] Are Greek Policemen Really Voting in Droves for Greece's Neo-Nazi Party?

June Samaras june.samaras at gmail.com
Sun Jun 24 21:38:12 PDT 2012


Are Greek Policemen Really Voting in Droves for Greece's Neo-Nazi Party?

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/06/are-greek-policemen-really-voting-in-droves-for-greeces-neo-nazi-party/258767/

By Max Fisher

Jun 22 2012, 7:20 AM ET 5

A much-circulated news report says half voted for the far-right Golden
Dawn. The math is dubious at best, but there are hints of some truth
behind it.

gd june20 p.jpg
Golden Dawn party leader Nikolaos Mihaloliakos talks to reporters at
an Athens news conference. (Reuters)
The rise of Greece's neo-Nazi political party, Golden Dawn, is a scary
enough story on its own. Its members brandish a swastika-like logo on
their official flag, throw Nazi salutes, sell Mein Kampf at their
official headquarters, threaten journalists, deny the Holocaust, and
beat immigrants, none of which stopped the group from winning 7
percent of the vote and 18 parliament seats in a recent election. But
it gets worse: according to prominent Greek newspaper To Vima, a
terrifying 50 percent of Greek policemen voted for Golden Dawn in both
the May and June parliamentary elections. Half!

Is it true? Maybe, sort of, according to Greek blogger Theodora
Oikonomides's much more transparent and detailed analysis of the
numbers. Ballots are of course secret in Greece, so there's no way to
know for sure how police are voting. But two details of the Greek
voting system make it easier to infer: the number of voters assigned
to each polling station is small, and police are assigned a polling
station based not on where they live but there they work. So a polling
station that covers, say, a police precinct office will
disproportionately reflect the police vote.

That's not really enough information to calculate exact police voting
numbers, as To Vima claims to have done, but it is enough to at least
look at trends. And the trend is, as Oikonomides puts it,
"astounding." In downtown Athens, for example, most polling stations
returned Golden Dawn votes about in line with the national average of
7 percent. But the dozen or so stations clustered around the General
Police Directorate received a far higher proportion of votes for
Golden Dawn: mostly around 20 or 21 percent, three times the national
average.

So where did To Vima get their 50 percent number? They say that 20 to
30 percent of voters in these districts are police -- it's not clear
how they know this, maybe police register separately? Assuming that
the 70 to 80 percent of non-police voters held to the national 7
percent average, assuming that the variation due entirely to police
voters, and assuming that police turnout was the same as non-police
turnout, then To Vima estimates that between 45 and 59 percent of
policemen in these districts voted for Golden Dawn. From this, they
extrapolate that half of Greek policemen support the neo-Nazi group.
The math is sound, but it rests on so many assumptions that it's hard
to take their much-circulated "50 percent" figure seriously.

Even if you do take their assumptions, it's entirely possible that the
prevalence of Golden Dawn voters here is just a coincidence; there
might be some other bunch of people in the area voting for the
neo-Nazi party. And even if these Greek police did vote for Golden
Dawn, that doesn't mean they represent all Greek police. After all,
Oikonomides notes that the trend is much less apparent around the
national riot police headquarters in Kaisariani, for example.

Still, while it's not a clear national trend, the apparent correlation
between police-heavy voting stations and Golden Dawn votes in Athens
and elsewhere sure looks like what Oikonomides calls "anecdotal
evidence" for a connection.

And there's some reason to think that it might not be shocking for
Golden Dawn to find more popular support among policemen than regular
Greeks. That's not because Greek police have shown fealty to Nazi
ideals or anything like that. Rather, Golden Dawn has some links,
mostly ideological and rhetorical, to the far-right military regime
that ruled Greece from 1967 to 1974. The junta was brutal, but, like
any police state, it was good to the police, and it made law and order
a priority. That's not to say that police want a return to
dictatorship, but as austerity worsens, a number of government workers
could lose their jobs. When Golden Dawn leader Nikos Michaloliakos
speaks fondly about the military regime that had made such an ally of
police, that could appeal to policemen worried about feeding their
families, whether they happen to believe in neo-Nazism or not.

-- 
June Samaras
2020 Old Station Rd
Streetsville,Ontario
Canada L5M 2V1
Tel : 905-542-1877
E-mail : june.samaras at gmail.com



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