BY RENEE MALTEZOU Reuters In the port of Piraeus, dozens of young men with shaven heads and black t-shirts packed a small room one evening to hear Golden Dawn's dream of a Greece purged of foreigners, its borders sealed with landmines. “We want all illegal immigrants out, we want to take their stench out of this place,” said Frangiscos Porihis, an election candidate for the ultra-nationalist and highly secretive party. “They shouldn't be here and they will leave one way or the other - the good or the bad way,” he told the Piraeus meeting. With Greece deep in economic and social crisis, the party is promising voters in next month's elections to start by expelling illegal immigrants - before moving on to the legal ones. With its anti-foreigner message plus some welfare parcels for a few of Greece's many needy, Golden Dawn has emerged from obscurity in the last few months and now seems certain to enter parliament comfortably when the nation votes on May 6. Flanked by bookshelves lined with books on Aryan supremacy and nationalism, the Piraeus audience listened in rapt attention. Leaflets declaring “Not a single unemployed Greek, not a single illegal immigrant in Greece” lay on tables, alongside manifestos proclaiming “Greece belongs to Greeks”. Opinion polls suggest that Golden Dawn could win around five percent of the vote, comfortably above the three percent threshold for entering parliament. This would be a staggering feat for a party considered until now by many Greeks as little more than a rabble-rousing fringe group which took 0.23 percent in the last general election three years ago. Linked to racist, anti-immigrant attacks, Golden Dawn is set to become the most extreme right-wing party to sit in parliament since Greece returned to democracy after the fall of a military dictatorship in 1974. Golden Dawn's rhetoric resonates with Greeks who blame rising crime on the hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants flocking to the country's porous borders. The party's community-based efforts and anti-politician talk have also won fans among Greeks bristling with anger at an entire political class which they see as corrupt and self-serving, analysts say. With repeated waves of wage and pension cuts to save the country from bankruptcy, Greece has sunk into its deepest recession since World War II. “It's not that Greeks became right-wing overnight,” said Thomas Gerakis, head of the Marc pollster group. “They just want to send a message to the political system as a whole.” Golden Dawn's candidates are not career politicians; they include farmers, shepherds, workers and retired army officers. In working class neighborhoods of Athens, Golden Dawn has been quietly building itself up as a friendly, reliable face among hard-hit Greeks that the state has failed to help. For over a year, party members have given needy families bags of rice and pasta, olive oil and clothes in cartons labelled: “I vote for Golden Dawn to clean up the place” and “For Athens to become Greek again”. Former Socialist voter Katerina Karousi, a 76-year-old cancer patient, broke down in sobs when party members showed up at her doorstep with large bags of food on Friday morning. “I hear they are doing nice things for people. Why not vote for them?” said her husband, 79-year-old Andreas Karoussis. Elsewhere, Golden Dawn escorts the elderly who are wary of immigrants to bank ATMs, said spokesman Elias Panagiotaros. Golden Dawn's manifesto is less benevolent than the good-neighbor image its food drive has helped to cultivate. Illegal immigrants must be immediately arrested and deported, and legal immigrants eventually expelled as well, the group says. It wants crimes committed by immigrants to fall under a special category, with their sentences carried out in special detention centers where the immigrants are put to work. “There are people who have been living in a building for 40-50 years and they suddenly realize that it's only them and maybe another family and that the rest are third-world foreigners who live in groups of 30-40 in one apartment,” said Panagiotaros. The group has little sympathy for the political class. Politicians behind Greece's crisis must be hauled before a special court, jailed and their property seized, the group says, while any Greek refusing to join the conscript army will be stripped of their citizenship and exiled. Golden Dawn has also tapped into anti-German sentiment by attacking the bailout package from the EU and International Monetary Fund and what it calls German domination of Europe. __
