What a difference a year makes. Last September, Golden Dawn, the Greek neo-Nazi group that had exploded onto the national scene in the twin parliamentary elections of 2012, was flying high. Its poll numbers were consistently in the double digits, and it had established itself as the third most popular party in the country. In accordance with leader Nikos Michaloliakos’s vow to continue the struggle “inside and outside parliament,” the group’s “activists” were running amuck, beating and occasionally killing immigrants, terrorizing people who did not share their racist-nationalist worldview, organizing food distribution drives for Greeks only—the latter dubbed “soup kitchens of hate” by Athens mayor George Kaminis. Particularly active in Golden Dawn’s extra-parliamentary raids were its 18 members of parliament. Ilias Kasidiaris, their rabid young spokesman, explained the benefits of being an elected representative: “We can carry weapons with a permit, if there is an incident there is no in flagrante process, and we are a bit freer in our movements,” he told a crowd of supporters.

Today, all 18 parliamentary deputies of Golden Dawn are awaiting trial as suspected members of a criminal organization. Nine of them, including Michaloliakos, are in prison. Three more, including Michaloliakos’s wife, are under house arrest. But at the same time, Golden Dawn remains the third most popular party in most opinion polls. Last May, it came in third in the European elections with 9.4 percent of the vote—an increase of more than 30 percent compared to its parliamentary election tally.

To understand this paradoxical and ominous state of affairs, we must return to the tumultuous events of the previous fall. The arrests began on September 28 last year—ten days after the murder, in the working class district of Keratsini of Pavlos Fyssas, a 34-year old left-wing rap musician, by a member of Golden Dawn. Nikos Dendias, currently Minister of Development, played a central role in the authorities’ decision to go after Golden Dawn. As Minister of Citizen Protection, he watched the growing assertiveness of the group with mounting trepidation. “The alarm bells had already gone off a few days before the murder [of Fyssas] with the parade of Golden Dawn storm troops in Meligala”—the site of a slaughter of Nazi collaborators and civilians by communist guerillas in 1944—he tells me in his office overlooking Syntagma Square, opposite parliament. “We thought, what if they were to do this in Syntagma? What sort of an image would we project of the Greek state if storm troops were allowed to parade in front of the tomb of the Unknown Soldier?”

Until that point, the government had hesitated to go after Golden Dawn. This was in part because the Greek constitution—for specific historical reasons related to the long prohibition of the Greek Communist Party—forbids the banning of political parties. But the delay can also be attributed to reluctance on the part of Prime Minister Antonis Samaras—under the influence in particular of his close advisor Takis Baltakos—to take action against a party that had attracted many of the conservative New Democracy’s right-wing supporters—voters whom he hoped to win back. (Dendias, also a New Democracy man, calls the strategy an “illusion.”) Baltakos, a lawyer with far-right views, even promoted the idea of a coalition between New Democracy and Golden Dawn, to prevent the ascension of SYRIZA, the hard-left official opposition, to power.

Meanwhile, the situation worsened. Earlier that September, a group of Communist Party activists were out putting up posters, when they were surrounded and set upon by Golden Dawn thugs in their notorious black shirts. Eight communists had to be taken to hospital. The attacks took place in a once-thriving ship-repair zone in Perama, a small town near Piraeus where unemployment now hovers around 50 percent.