As dangerous as the contemporary far right is, it is hard to ignore their propensity for frivolity. Many culture war debates revolve around relatively inconsequential news stories whose significance is inflamed: in the American context, this can be seen in the MAGA-aligned press’ fixation with Hollywood casting decisions or, more humorously, Tucker Carlson’s M&M-related anxieties. These episodes are not meaningless: they speak to and mobilize deeper political grievances related to changing understandings of gender and racial oppression. But they do this through a kind of tabloid politics that is more intent on attracting attention to their issues of concern than making policy suggestions.
A 2024 Greek episode follows this same pattern. Far-right parties and media issued furious statements following revisions to science textbooks used in public secondary schools, which appeared to use English grammar when using the names of chemical compounds. The names were still in Greek, they were just phrased like English. Critics claimed these textbooks were now gibberish and read like they were written by Google Translate.
The language issue and the various political projects it has historically been attached to offer far-right parties a reservoir of narratives and ideas for their own top-down efforts at culture-building.
Concerns over the importation of foreign linguistic conventions are nowhere near as politically salient in Greece as racial and gender-based justice is in the US. However, these language issues provide a unique vantage point for studying far-right approaches to changing national cultures, especially considering the centrality that Greek nationalism bestows on language. For all the ancient history, the contemporary Greek state is young; given the geographically disparate population of Greek speakers before independence, its language had to be built and disseminated from the top downwards. Consequently, the language issue and the various political projects it has historically been attached to offer far-right parties a reservoir of narratives and ideas for their own top-down efforts at culture-building.
A Looming Subject
Despite being a core historical-political issue, language is seemingly no longer a heated topic of policy debate in Greece, even for far-right parties. Their manifestos explicitly mention language maybe two or three times, and many of these are just slogans calling on Greeks to “take back our homeland and preserve our language, culture and religion!”
What is interesting about the language issue, however, is the frequency with which it appears in other policy areas and the passion it can still evoke. These days, it emerges most explosively in the opposition to the 2018 Prespa Agreements, when the Greek and Macedonian governments agreed to allow the Balkan state to use “Macedonia” in its name and recognized the existence of a Macedonian language. This agreement is still deeply unpopular and, despite mobilizing opponents of all political stripes, the movement against it has been spearheaded by the far right. A 2019 protest in Athens was attended by up to 100,000 participants, while far-right youth groups have instigated attacks on refugees and immigrants in the Greek Macedonian region. In 2022, Greece’s once-largest far-right party, the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn (GD), organized a rally in the northern town of Florina against a court decision approving the establishment of a Macedonian Language Center. The decision was later reversed.
Language is also a central topic in education policy. All Greek far-right parties promise to introduce mandatory Ancient Greek classes in primary school—whereas students currently only study it in for three years in secondary school—and some suggest it should be mandatory at all levels. Furthermore, Kyriakos Velopoulos, the leader of Greek Solution (currently the largest far-right populist party), has made a habit of raising concerns in parliament about the funding and quality of Greek language schools in Europe and North America.
Yet, nationalist concerns over the purity of language are not unique to Greece. What gives them force is their position in a long-running, often ferocious debate over what the Greek language is, how it should be standardized, and what values it should espouse.
Tenuous Unity
As Greek nationalism was emerging in the run-up to the country’s 1821-9 war of independence from the Ottoman Empire, elites confronted the problem of what the nation’s language should be. There existed High and Low variants: the alphabet, grammar, and vocabulary of Ancient Greek had been used by the Byzantine Empire for official texts and was still being taught to priests and monks. However, the spoken language had evolved significantly over thousands of years. Most elites believed that, to create a national language, they would need to elevate spoken Greek by adding ancient Greek influence.
Eventually, the debate solidified around two compromising positions. One advocated for what is called Katharevousa: a highly formal proposal that prioritized the High written language. Katharevousa’s first theorist, the philologist Adamantios Korais, explicitly sought to “clean up” vernacular Greek by getting rid of foreign and “vulgar” terms and replacing them with the vocabulary and grammar of Ancient Greek. The other camp supported Demotic Greek, referring to various attempts to collate and standardize a language based on the various dominant vernaculars of spoken Greek. In the early days of independence, when strong state capacity still did not exist, Katharevousa became the de facto official language, spreading through literary and published writings, though local communities continued speaking their local varieties. Advocacy for Demotic continued to spread as the state built an education system and sought to unite Greek speakers outside of their borders. In the early 20th century, successive governments ping-ponged, making one the official language and undoing the reforms of their predecessors until, in 1967, an extremely unpopular military junta took power and aggressively sought to institute Katharevousa. When they fell from power, the state adopted Demotic as its national language with little controversy, which remains the case today.
The Greek language typically becomes a salient political topic in one of three conditions. First, in situations of perceived national shame, identifying and creating unique aspects of the language takes priority. Early Greek philologists saw their task as rebuilding a crushed national spirit, meaning they did not stop at purging Turkish words: Italian and Slavic influences were also targeted. Second, an impulse towards standardization and “elevation” typically emerges when the cultural distance between elites and citizens expands. In the early days of the Greek state, when the chief linguists built their languages from afar in Paris or Vienna, or during periods of unpopular military rule, elites justified their own alienation by portraying the people as needing assistance to understand and access the liberating historical qualities of Greekness. Lastly, language concerns are inflamed when geopolitical insecurity portends more exclusionary developments. Their salience is particularly closely tied to the emergence of Bulgarian nationalism, which laid claim to many of the same territories that Greek politicians considered to be theirs, and outbreaks of violence in the Balkans.
The Greek language typically becomes a salient political topic in situations of perceived national shame, when the cultural distance between elites and citizens expands, and when geopolitical insecurity portends more exclusionary developments.
Illiberalism, Past and Present
This history gives today’s illiberal forces room to maneuver. Illiberalism does not simply refer to political movements that reject liberalism writ large. Indeed, illiberal forces “have emerged from within the liberal framework,” and thus their ideas and rhetoric are inseparable from the contradictions of that framework. They do not simply propose dismantling the system; instead, they retain parts of it and claim to honor its failed promises. In the Greek case, this happens in two ways.
First, references to the Greek language demonstrate the tension between the mythmaking and exclusion inherent in nation-building and the dominant liberal norms around international openness, cosmopolitanism, and diversity. Language is the singular cultural link between the contemporary Greeks and the ancients. Advocates for both sides of the language debate have claimed that their preferred option descends directly from Ancient Greek and, in fact, the actions taken by governing authorities—the Byzantine Empire, the Eastern Orthodox Church, and the early Greek state—to preserve the ancient language makes this link easy for people to see through a similar alphabet and shared words.
This linguistic nationalism is a core national myth, a “banal nationalism” that is taken to its logical limit by the far right who use it to portray Greece as a constant, homogenous historical entity whose nationals are cut from the same cloth as the people who (supposedly) invented Western civilization, democracy, philosophy, and so on. This puts the dominant national identity in direct tension with liberal norms. If Greek-ness is a glorious inheritance passed down by generations, why should non-Greeks who lack this connection be deserving of equal political consideration?
If nationhood is built on blood and language, when those outside of the linguistic community share Greek names, words, or historical figures, they blur the lines meant to establish Greece’s unique identity.
If nationhood is built on blood and language, when those outside of the linguistic community share Greek names, words, or historical figures, they blur the lines meant to establish Greece’s unique identity. For this reason, opponents of the Prespa Agreement often refuse to accept North Macedonia as a state; Golden Dawn refers to its language as a “Bulgarian dialect.” In this view, they do not have a legitimate claim over the name and history they base their national identity on, so their right to self-determination is just weaker than Greece’s.
Second, invocations of language normalize violence and norm-breaking behavior through reference to “non-liberal pockets” in Greece’s recent past. Following the 1912-3 Balkan wars, successive governments pursued a policy of cultural homogeneity, targeting groups speaking Slavic languages. The repression of this policy escalated throughout the interwar years until authorities were imprisoning Slav speakers and forcing them to Hellenize their names. Discrimination against Slavic and Turkish dialects increased, but was rarely tackled by the central government. This legacy continues as Greek Solution turns Greek Macedonian constituencies—towns like Florina, where many linguistic minorities live—into electoral strongholds. They whitewash the violence of cultural homogeneity and use geopolitical language in this pursuit, claiming that North Macedonia’s insistence on its name implies broader irredentist goals to subsume more of Greek culture and land. The result is to normalize the historical violence that the 2022 Florina protests are now part of.
Another relevant non-liberal pocket is Greece’s brief yet explosive imperial history. In the late 19th century, Greek foreign policy focused on uniting territories of mostly Greek-speaking populations from the Black Sea to Cappadocia to Cyprus. This project ended in disaster, but all far-right parties express a nostalgia for it. The NIKI party, who have a seat in the European Parliament, speaks of uniting Eastern Orthodox and Greek-speaking peoples across Eastern Europe. Voice of Reason, who also gained an MEP with more votes, put language and culture as the focal issue in their foreign policy manifesto, describing them as Greece’s “nuclear weapons.” While a language-based foreign policy has yet to be formulated, many still see Greece’s large diaspora as a source of soft power capable of being mobilized.
While a language-based foreign policy has yet to be formulated, many still see Greece’s large diaspora as a source of soft power capable of being mobilized.
These trends collide in the new front of the language issue: the diaspora. Free movement has modified the Greek language. Young people now often break into “Greeklish,” writing with Latin letters and adding English words; diaspora populations bring new accents and slang. Golden Dawn sees these trends as contributing to the “vulgarization of Greek.” When the party established food banks, health centers, and job centers for “Greeks Only,” they also excluded people whose parents were not both Greek.
The diaspora issue is not this simple, though: it produces a tension for the far right. Just as before, the humiliation of the 2010s reignited a wish to purify language from foreign influence. However, the view of the Greek state as the protector of all Greek speakers remains hegemonic, so the violence reserved for linguistic minorities is off limits. For now, far-right parties advocate for extending voting rights to diaspora nationals and investing heavily in Greek education abroad, but this is a space where far-right thinking is continuing to evolve; should their framings around diaspora dialects change, their policy approach may become more forceful.
Controlling Culture
The legacy of the language debate remains influential, but it seems the underlying controversy has died out. None of the above proposals seek to change the official Greek language. Where language is mentioned, the goals are negative: to resist organic changes and more inclusive policies.
Far-right parties despise new, urban, and cosmopolitan cultures but lack any real alternative. The Greek language issue, however, offers a potential model for changing culture in such conditions.
This mirrors the same dilemmas faced by far-right parties in Europe and North America: they despise new, urban, and cosmopolitan cultures but lack any real alternative. Cultural production is more decentralized, transnationalized, and democratized than ever. No longer is there a clear cultural cutting-edge that can be given status by the state through museums and public theaters. Instead, the far right competes for representation within existing art forms and genres, from country, rap, and heavy metal music to television shows to children’s books. Even if far-right parties could forge a unified national culture, it is not clear what it would consist of. Consequently, they prefer reactive strategies: putting their allies in charge of cultural institutions, removing critical social and historical material from school curricula, and quietly pressuring artists from spreading subversive messages. The Greek language issue, however, offers a potential model for changing culture in such conditions.
Golden Dawn is the only far-right party with a clear position on the old language debate. Nikolaos Michaloliakos, its leader, found his first political role as the leader of the youth organization tied to the now-imprisoned Greek junta leader, Georgios Papadopoulos. Like the junta, he supports Katharevousa. However, Golden Dawn differentiates itself through its explicitly Nazi ideology and populist appeals, particular through their reification of (certain) Greek folk traditions. Michaloliakos argues that local dialects, like Doric, Pontic, Cypriot, and Maniot ones are also descended from Ancient Greek and must be preserved—ultimately giving his support to the proposals of a prominent 19th-century writer whose works embellished Katharevousa with words from Demotic, local dialects, and early Byzantine liturgical vocabularies.
What is more interesting is that the party and its leaders do not raise issues about the Greek language itself, but rather with the state project that elevated Demotic and pushed both Katharevousa and local dialects out of education. They do not propose top-down action. Instead, they speak nostalgically of a time when Greeks grew up speaking their regional dialect, learning the unifying Katharevousa through “press and radio” instead of a centralized education system. They write: “Neither Cavafy or Kazantzakis, nor the Nobel laureates Seferis and Elytis suffered the brunt of the educational reforms of these foolish ideologues.”
For some parts of the Greek far right, the state’s role is facilitatory: it must keep out corrupting influence by force, preserve—and possibly fossilize—national and local traditions, and amplify the histories and texts that, in their eyes, best represent the nation.
Their hope is to liberate the creative powers of the nation by keeping it free of corrupting foreign influences, reaffirming Korais’ maxim that “He who thinks badly speaks badly, and he who speaks badly prevents his mind from discovering the faculty of thinking, or even abolishes it completely.” Their underlying assumption is that the nation’s unique and superior qualities guarantee that it will produce a dynamic culture regardless of state intervention. The state’s role then is facilitatory: it must keep out corrupting influence by force, preserve—and possibly fossilize—national and local traditions, and amplify the histories and texts that, in their eyes, best represent the nation. Instead of changing the content produced by cultural institutions, perhaps today’s far right seeks to gradually insulate cultural production from other nations and place it within an institutional scaffolding that looks inwards.
In a similar vein, Giorgia Meloni has made headlines with her attacks on the leadership of major cultural institutions, particularly targeting foreign directors. But these changes have produced relatively few ideological changes to their character. Instead, their goal seems to be to elevate only Italians to positions of cultural power even if, for now, that means promoting people with opposing views.
Of course, this project is doomed. What influence counts as “foreign” is always defined arbitrarily, and it will never be possible to block out all of them. But this logic has a clear appeal in today’s politics: it offers a full-throated defense of the various national characteristics that liberal democracies happily incorporate into their banal nationalisms and offers to defend them without dictating what culture the nation consumes or mitigating their freedom to choose which cultural spheres to belong to.
Alberto Polimeni is a researcher based in London. He has an MA in Comparative Politics from the London School of Economics and a BA in War Studies and Philosophy from King’s College London. His research is interested in how far-right populist parties make strategic political decisions, how they prompt systemic changes in political systems, and their emerging foreign policy ideas.
Image made by Aaron Irion using “Acropolis, Athens,” by Bryce Edwards licensed under CC Attribution 2.0 Generic.
