Close PM associate rules out Golden Dawn overture

A day after a veteran New Democracy MP urged his party to cooperate with the far-right Golden Dawn party, a close aid to the prime minister said the idea was a non-starter.

“New Democracy will never, ever cooperate with those neo-Nazis,” Chrysanthos Lazaridis, a party hard-liner, said in an interview with Mega TV on Tuesday.

On Monday, Vyron Polydoras, a former minister and parliamentary speaker, suggested ND should cooperate with Golden Dawn along with other parties as part of a “broader consensus” to defend the nation. He did not clarify his statement.

Polydoras’s remarks prompted an uncomfortable response from ND, with a spokesperson describing Polydoras’s comments as “strange.”

Meanwhile on Monday Golden Dawn issued a statement saying that it “spits on all corrupt pseudo-politicians” and predicting that the next government would be a coalition between ND and leftist opposition SYRIZA.

A recent poll put ND on 22 percent, followed by SYRIZA on 20.8 percent. Golden Dawn party was third on 9.1 percent, followed by coalition partners PASOK on 6.1 percent.