The election results registered the country’s growing social polarization. The parties of the labor movement by and large maintained their electoral support while, at the opposite end of the spectrum, right-wing demagogue Georgos Karatzaferis made headway in his efforts to form an ultrarightist opposition formation.

Karatzaferis pitched his campaign around strong Greek nationalist themes, railing against "globalization" and the supposed "domination of the Greek economy" by bureaucrats in the European Union (EU). He called for a "Greece that belongs to Greeks," making it clear that he does not include immigrants in the latter category, and targeted immigrant workers from Albania for particular venom.

From PASOK, Theodore Pangalos, a senior party member and former foreign minister, did his best to put a positive spin on the nationwide results. "PASOK’s strategy," he said, "was to avert a crushing defeat nationwide. It has succeeded." Alongside its setbacks in many municipalities, the party’s candidate for the important post of governor of the greater Athens region defeated her ND rival. The new mayor of the city itself, on the other hand, is the ND’s Dora Bakyoanni, who gained almost 60 percent of the vote.

PASOK has governed Greece for 18 of the last 21 years. Its support held relatively steady in most parts of the country, with the exception of the cotton-farming districts of the north and south, where many farmers joined the large nationwide absentee vote or switched their votes to the ND.

Other parties with links to the working class, including the Communist Party and the parties in the Coalition of the Left, did about as well as in the previous municipal elections in 1998, receiving a total of roughly one-fifth of the ballot.

Karatzaferis, the leader of the newly formed rightist Popular Orthodox Rally (LAOS, an acronym that means "people") took almost 14 percent of the total vote. LAOS brings together a number of politicians who earlier jumped ship from ND and PASOK. Karatzaferis himself was a longtime ND member of Parliament and a leading party figure in Athens.

"Greek jobs must come first," said the rightist leader in his speech at the founding of the new party on September 14, 2001. "Albanians are taking the money of Greek taxpayers and sending it back to Albania to buy Kalashnikovs to attack Ioannina and Thesprotia," he claimed.

Such statements received a hearing in the wake of years of anti-immigrant attacks by the PASOK government, carried out in the name of fighting unemployment. Greece’s unemployment rate exceeds 10 percent, while wages stand at 71 percent of the EU average.

Before the elections Archbishop Chrystodoulos, the national leader of the Orthodox church, helped to confer respectability on the new party by reassuring prospective LAOS voters that they were "good Christians."

Although Karatzaferis disavows any association with fascism, two leaders of Chrisi Avgi, a fascist group whose cadre have attacked immigrants and left-wing campaigners in the streets, joined the new party’s slate in the Athens-Pireas prefecture.

During the campaign Karatzaferis also denied accusations that he supports the deposed Greek king and admires the military junta that held the country in an iron grip for seven years after a 1967 coup. Well-known figures from the dictatorship, however, are regular guests on the television stations that he owns.

From this broadcast platform, Karatzaferis unveils his full program, accusing Jews and the Pope of being the architects of the "new world order" that brings with it wars and growing economic hardship. "The whole country is being run by Jews," he has stated.

"They say that to get ahead you have to be one of three things," he said. "A Jew, a homosexual or a communist. We are none of these."

The stable vote for the workers’ parties, in spite of their own nationalist stances and inability to chart a way forward out the country’s economic crisis, in part registered the fact that many people reject this demagogy and consider it dangerous.  
 
 
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