Understanding the electoral breakthrough of Golden Dawn in Greece: A demand and supply perspective

In 2010, the PASOK government took a significant step toward the reform of the Greek Citizenship Code through an amendment that was widely hailed as a positive development in indicators such as the Migrant Integration Policy Index, which declared in its 2010 assessment that ‘Greece made the greatest overall progress of any MIPEX country’ (MIPEX 2010). At its core, the amendment sought to implement rules on the processing of citizenship claims, which until then had been decided at the discretion of administrative authorities (Christopoulos 2013: 11). The reform simplified the citizenship acquisition process for several groups, and for the first time ‘incorporated provisions for the naturalisation of third-generation migrants’ (ibid: 12). Within the domestic arena, the amendment did not receive as warm a welcome as that of MIPEX. The current Prime Minister, Antonis Samaras (ND), has been a ‘ferocious opponent’ of the legislation (ibid: 15), which was in fact recently deemed unconstitutional by the Council of State because the formal requirements that it introduced were seen as inadequate tests of an individual’s attachment to the ‘nation’ (Triantafyllidou 2013).
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