My articles is based on my ancestral background, Greece. This article mainly discusses the association of immigration, and the evolutions of the right-wing organization, Golden Dawn. This article also discusses the immigration issues within Greece, the political structure of right-wing extremism, the 2015-2016 refugee crisis, and the existence of the populist radical right party, Popular Orthodox Rally.
One piece of this peer reviewed article that really intrigued me was the section about the refugee crisis that happened within Greece in 2015-2016. In this time period, hundreds of thousands of refugees were coming into Greece to seek asylum. After the “implementation of the EU-Turkey agreement on returnees in March 2016, there was a sudden and significant drop in the flow of refugees to Greece” (Vandoros 62). What was the EU-Turkey deal? Essentially Turkey agreed to take back refugees that entered Greece, and then send legal refugees to EU. In exchange, EU gave Turkey six billion euros, and allow visa-free travel for Turkish citizens for a short time period. All though this seems like an immediate solution to the refugee crisis within Greece, but in reality it posed it’s issues. At the time, many refugees were still stranded in Greece. This posed a large issue because Greek government did not have the means to take care of these refugees because of its economy and the relative magnitude of the crisis itself.
The Golden Dawn organization then took this opportunity to exploit these issues and the refugees to help push their political agenda. Golden Dawn regularly demonized the refugees stating that “immigrants and refugees as intruders and violent criminals who will ruin Greece, even in biological terms, as carriers of contagious diseases” (Vandoros 63).
I generally thought this article was very interesting. It didn’t have that many emotional key words that indicated a specific political bias, and seemed relatively balanced.
Vandoros, Sotiris G. “Immigration and Political Opportunities for Right-Wing Extremism.” Mediterranean Quarterly, vol. 29, no. 1, 2018, pp. 48–69., doi:10.1215/10474552-4397336.