[Ian Smith son]

Golden Dawn Is Running In Greece's Elections Again. Here's Why That's Scary.

ATHENS -- Golden Dawn, Greece's extremist far-right party, appeared on the political scene almost 30 years ago, but has thrived during the past crisis years.

Here's what you need to know about it:

The History

Nikos Michaloliakos, a former mathematics student who had been a member of extremist right-wing youth organizations since his teenage years and was imprisoned for participating in bomb attacks in

Athens, launched “Golden Dawn,” a national-socialist journal supportive of Greece's former military junta, in 1980. Five years later, he founded a political party with the same name.

From the start, Michaloliakos’ program and semiotics were quintessentially nationalist and racist, strongly reminiscent of Nazi ideology. Golden Dawn was recognized as a political party in 1993, but because

of its radical beliefs remained marginal at first.

In the 1990s, the party gained some attention when it opposed the name change of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia to the “Republic of Macedonia” -- a designation Greeks associate with the

territories in the north of Greece -- and because of the rise of violence by extreme-right street gangs that were behind attacks on demonstrators and left-wing students.

Golden Dawn participated for the first time in elections in 1996, receiving 0.1 percent of the vote. They didn’t participate again in elections until 2009, when they won almost 0.3 percent of the vote.

Golden Dawn Is Running In Greece's Elections Again. Here's Why That's Scary.