It’s been a while since we were presented with a good opportunity to look at an x-ray of the Greek society. In this case, it’s useful to look into local elections for a sign of things to come for the ailing S.European country. Yesterday, Sunday the 18th of May, the first of two voting rounds was held. In some cases a second one won't be necessary as a clear winner emerged, but in major urban centers like Athens, the ballots will be waiting right alongside those for the EU elections next Sunday.

Before we focus on Athens, it’s worth looking at what happened around Greece. A rather positive shift took place in the northern region of Chalkidiki, where the protests around the opening of a mine in the ancient forest of Skouries resulted in the crushing defeat of mayor C.Pachtas, who was accused of corruption and with enabling the Canadian mining multinational El Dorado to operate unhindered by local objections to the project.

But for that piece of good news, the image emerging from around Greece, is anything but positive. Celebrities, some affiliated with the far-right, have won mayoral positions from the first Sunday. In Volos, one of Greece’s biggest cities, a businessman only recently released from prison where he was serving time for fixing football matches, also came out on top to become the city’s top public servant. In my hometown of Ioannina, the conservative candidate D.Gontas looks likely to reclaim the position he held until 4 years ago, despite a largely negative record while in office and accusations of corruption.

While the results in Thessaloniki (second biggest city) look interesting, I will admit I know little on the city’s local government so we are going to stick with Athens instead, in an effort to understand what is happening in Greece right now, away from the wishful thinking that speaks of financial recovery and general stability. The markets are of course voting with their money in favour of Greece and seem willing to take the government’s claims at face value, but does this actually reflect the undergoing processes inside the country?

THE CITY AND THE CANDIDATES

I only recently spent a month in Greece after some time. Last time I was there, June 2013, I visited Exarchia, the bohemian, ever-rebellious downtown neighborhood, to find it (and largely downtown Athens) squeaky clean. Heavily armed police had pushed out the homeless, the addicts, the elements of the neighborhood that make it look rough around the edges but also real. It was a weird feeling. The image repeated itself around the centre, with an atmosphere of security mixed with intimidation hanging over our heads.

This time it was very different. The drug trade has returned to Exarchia with a vengeance, its famous square becomes unapproachable even on a Saturday night, plainclothes policemen survey the new everyday. “It used to be that only a single drug sold around here, be it heroin, coke, sisa. Not it’s everything. All of Athens comes here to get high.” a friend of mine and long-time Exarchia resident tells me.

Exarchia is important, because it combines a high population density and mixed income levels. Young professionals, established lawyers, some bohemian aristocracy… they huddle around the narrow streets with the precariat; the students, the designers, the freelancers. Around the corner, the newly arrived immigrants selling black-market cigarettes and more, depends who you ask. It’s in this climate that Athenians were called in to vote on who is going to be the mayor of the formerly third richest municipality in the EU. And in this climate, the dividing lines are becoming clearer than ever.

The candidates to take the helm of the city for the next five years (after a recent change in the law that extends the mayor’s term to that) were four:

First amongst them, and most likely to emerge as a winner, is current mayor and PASOK-backed candidate Giorgos Kaminis, a rather controversial figure. He has tried to defang the Golden Dawn in Athens by opposing their plans for handouts and direct actions in some ways, but has dealt with squats and demonstrations in a way that would find the neonazi party nodding in approval and who has a dramatic record in immigration, security and keeping the city clean. He nevertheless is a promise of stability and the first Sunday found him polling at 21.6%.

His close opponent is the SYRIZA endorsed Gabriel Sakelaridis, a 33 year old economist, a face fresh and untarnished by old politics and corruption, but still a product of the same party mechanisms. He is often described as Tsipras’ likely successor. People who have interviewed him are shocked by the fact that “he is just a guy, a normal person, you know?”. He runs on a program that reflects much of SYRIZA’s general agenda and has gathered around him a rather young team looking to run not on a ‘law and order’ platform like most other candidates but an open and caring one. A voting percentage of 20% will see him through to the second round, where he will face off with Kaminis. But it’s two candidates that won’t be making it to the next round that are signs of dark times ahead for Greece.

The lighter case is that of Aris Spiliotopoulos, the New Democracy backed candidate. While relatively young for the mostly aging party and coming from the more liberal wing of the greek conservatives, Spiliotopoulos opted to run on a very anti-immigration campaign, speaking about “cleaning up the city” of illegal trade and migrants, much like what the Golden Dawn has been promising. He vehemently opposed the proposed opening of a mosque in downtown Athens, claiming it would become an attraction for more immigration and a center of extremism. With borderline racist comments coming almost daily from his twitter account, Spiliotopoulos stood little chance against the already established Kaminis, who on an unofficial capacity enjoys the backing of Minister of Citizen Protection Nikos Dendias.

Of course, when it comes to racism, he also had to go against the professionals: The Golden Dawn’s Illias Kasidiaris. This is the most troubling case of all, and let me start with the bad news: The Golden Dawn more than doubled its percentages in the city of Athens. From the 7.9% in the local elections of 2009 and the 6.7% in the general elections of 2012, more than 16% of voters cast their vote for Kasidiaris this time around.

This places him in the same percentage as the mainstream New Democracy candidate, despite the fact he is awaiting trial to face charges of forming and leading a criminal organisation and for breaching private data after he published a video from a meeting between himself and the New Democracy secretary Takis Baltakos that resulted in the resignation of the latter, shot with a hidden camera. Around Attica, the GD got 180,828+ votes, 11.13% of the the total. So, despite the proclamations of stability and a bright future for Greece that Prime Minister Antonis Samaras likes to make, the neonazi party is still going up in the polls.

WHAT CHANGED, WHAT STAYED THE SAME

Let‘s’ point out the differences with 2009 and 2012. Whereas then, someone could claim that voting for the Golden Dawn was a protest vote or that voters were naive as to the party’s activities, there are no such excuses this time around. After the crackdown against them (that followed the murder of Pavlos Fyssas by a member of the party in September 2013) and the plethora of evidence on the party’s activities that have seen the light of day since the incident, there is no chance people don’ t know what they were voting for.

This is a clear sign of support for a party that is openly neonazi, undemocratic, violent, racist, anti-left, anti-workers rights, pro-capital and allegedly involved in activities such as money-laundering, murder, trafficking and running protection rings. Also interesting is the geography of the Golden Dawn vote. There are areas in Athens where the party found itself in the lead and in second place. Interestingly, these areas fall into two distinct groups: Poor ones, like Kypseli and and Patisia, and very rich ones, like the posh and exclusive Kolonaki, where the Golden Dawn came second with 13,7%.

This is something that is happening in the European Union as we speak. It is in my opinion, the EU’s fault that this dark side of the European psyche is waking up again, 70 years after the devastation brought on by the Second World War. Revelations in the Financial Times(£) in the past few weeks showed how Greece’s PM George Papandreou was essentially overthrown by the country’s lenders in 2011 in order to kill a referendum on the bailout package the country was negotiating at the time. But of course this “revelation” was more something we all knew and less something that shocked us. This loss of sovereignty is felt throughout Greece. The lack of control over the country’s destiny is reflected in the nihilistic undertones in attitudes felt throughout the capital.

Greece does indeed have a past with the far-right. A tradition that begins with the regime of Ioannis Metaxas before the second world war, continues with the nazi collaborators during the occupation of Greece by Nazi Germany and the 1967 dictatorship (with the protagonists of those two periods either the same or closely connected) and now with the Golden Dawn. This part of the Greek mentality is always present, it scatters at times of prosperity and hides in more mainstream parties, but always re-emerges at times of crisis. And in a drawn-out crisis such as this one, its rise was inevitable. But it’s not enough to explain what we are seeing. While this accounts for the hard core of the GD voters, it doesn’t explain the continuing appeal of the ultra-nationalists. For this, we have to look outside the country.