Health Minister Makis Voridis has framed the elections in a terminology that harks back to the Greek civil war, pledging this week to ‘defend with our vote what our grandfathers courageously defended with guns.’
“Our generation will not deliver the country to the left,” said Voridis, who rose from the fringes of the ultra-right in his early career, in a speech to his constituents in Aspropyrgos, adding that this Sunday’s election will be fought strictly on ideological grounds.
“I don’t need you to be fooled over the meaning of this Sunday’s election. It is a huge ideological clash between two worlds. The clash between the world of freedom and the homeland, the values of country, religion and family that we represent and the levelling of these things,that is represented by the left.
Voridis did not mention Syriza by name in his speech but used the more general term of the Left as if to accentuate the right-left wing rift.
Voridis – tipped by many, along with Administrative Reform Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, to succeed Antonis Samaras at the party helm – was involved with far right fascist groups in his early career. He campaigned with his far right Hellenic Front together with Kostas Plevris, the author of several books including the lengthy Jews: the Whole Truth which portrays the Jewish people as natural enemies of the Greeks. He moved to the far right Laos party in the 1997.
He gradually move towards the mainstream, joining New Democracy – along with Adonis Georgiadis – after serving as a minister in the interim government formed by Pasok, New Democracy and Laos under Lucas Papademos in 2011.
Voridis has denied he is an anti-semite and describes himself a nationalist but his appointment as health minister by Antonis Samaras drew a response from Greece’s Jewish community.
“No Jewish person can be happy about the appointment of a man who was, until two years ago, a head of the extreme right-wing and anti-Semitic LAOS party,” Victor Eliezer, the secretary general of the Central Board of Jewish Communities in Greece was quoted as saying at the time.