Three fresh-faced children appear on the TV screen and, to the sound of piano music, declare that they want Greece to belong to the Greeks.
The Golden Dawn party is the only answer to what they see as a creeping takeover by foreigners, the ad implies.
A little later, clips from the TV show Game of Thrones appear, warning Greeks, as in the original, that “winter is coming,” but that for them this means more poverty-inducing austerity imposed by the EU.
KKE, a communist party, will overthrow the system, it says.
The two parties — one sporting an old Greek symbol closely resembling a swastika as its emblem, the other the Soviet hammer and sickle — are far behind the leaders in today’s election, but they might come third and fourth respectively, providing noisy opposition.
Opinion polls show that the SYRIZA party of former Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras and the New Democracy Party of Vangelis Meimarakis are neck and neck, but dominant, gathering about 60 percent of the vote between them.
Next down the list is Golden Dawn, a party with many of its leaders in prison, yet drawing as much as 8 percent of the vote. That would give it more seats in the 300-seat parliament than the 17 it had in the previous one — most likely making them the third-largest party.
Accused of neo-Nazi tendencies, Golden Dawn might take more of the vote than the polls suggest because of a reluctance among some voters to admit their support.
“I don’t want to be a minority in my own country,” says one of the fresh-faced children in the ad.
It was Golden Dawn to which former Greek minister of finance Yanis Varoufakis was referring when he warned his German counterpart Wolfgang Schaeuble that forcing more austerity on Greeks could prompt a swing in voter behavior.
At the other end of the spectrum is the KKE, a communist party of the old school, founded in 1918 following the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and with a long history of enduring imprisonment, exile and even execution.
It is not as much of a pariah in the eyes of mainstream Greeks as Golden Dawn, not the least because of its resistance to Nazi Germany in World War II.
However, its message remains essentially unreconstructed, little different from the days of the Cold War. Greece is drowning in a “capitalist financial crisis,” it says.
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