European Parliament set to usher in first neo-Nazis

(BRUSSELS) - Though no stranger to controversy or diatribe, the European Parliament is set to usher in its first fully-fledged neo-Nazis members, from Germany and Greece.

With around 300,000 votes at Sunday's European elections the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) is expected to claim one of the country's 96 seats in the new Parliament, in a historical ground-breaker.

A recent change in German electoral laws, scrapping all minimum thresholds, paved the way for the march into parliament of the NPD, which has 6,000 members.

It describes itself as "national socialist," just like Germany's Nazis in the 1930s, and is openly xenophobic and anti-semitic so a group of German regional governments have tried to have it banned for propagating racism.

Meanwhile, with almost all ballots counted in Greece, the neo-Nazi "Golden Dawn" party is claiming over nine percent of the vote, which would net it three seats in the 751-member Parliament.

Golden Dawn was founded in the 1980s by Nikos Michaloliakos, an open admirer of Adolf Hitler. In 2012, Michaloliakos publicly denied the responsibility of Nazis in the mass-murder of six million Jews.

By harnessing resentment over EU-driven austerity measures imposed on Greece, Golden Dawn ran third in the European vote held on Sunday, behind the Coalition of the Radical Left and the centre-right New Democracy Party.

In June 2012, six of its 18 MPs in the Greek parliament, including Michaloliakos, were detained by police on charges of belonging to a criminal organisation after the killing of an anti-fascist musician.

Golden Dawn now counts 16 MPs in the Greek parliament, after two MPs left. One of those MPs now sits on the crossbenches, the other is in jail.