in June 2012 right before the elections (Naftemporiki, 2012b). In a similar tone, the President of far-right party Laos advocated that the only solution to the problem of ‘illegal migration’ was mass deportations. Some members of his party were even more extreme, mentioning death as a viable option. ‘Migration must be solved in two ways that must be clearly stated. One is safeguarding our borders. And this cannot exist if there are no casualties. To make myself clear, if there are no deaths’, said Mr Plevris, a member of the Greek parliament with the extreme right-wing party, LAOS.63 Military-like measures and far-right violence mainstreamed in political discourse appeared to be designed to siphon away voters who might otherwise be attracted to the antiimmigrant sentiments of the far-right ultranationalist party, Golden Dawn. As Karamanidou (2014, p. 456) warned the turn to ‘even more restrictive, control-oriented policies has run parallel with the rise of racist violence against immigrants’. To use expressions favoured by politicians, the issue of immigration is in danger of becoming a fenceless vine run by Chrysi Avgi [Golden Dawn] – a snake’s egg that has already hatched’. Indeed, the Golden Dawn’s programmatic statements included virulent posters promising to ‘get rid of the dirt off the city streets’ and called for ‘Greece only for Greeks’ (Smith (2013). The continuous arrival of migrants in this period not only sustained a backdrop of a wider social unease and anti-immigrant sentiment within Greece (Triandafyllidou and Kouki, 2014) but led to a widespread critique of Greece from EU member states. The country’s repeated failure to protect its borders had only heightened political tensions as EU states worried that their own political landscapes could not handle the tide of irregular migrants pouring into the rest of Europe via Greece. In June 2012, Greece failed its five-yearly Schengen evaluation due to ‘serious shortcomings’ in its border management, leading to the possibility that member states may reintroduce internal border controls at their own discretion in emergency cases (Council of the European Union, 2012). If this happened, Greece could have been effectively isolated from the rest of the Schengen zone. Irregular migration, then, became crucial for developing rhetoric surrounding the need for stricter border controls and tougher policies that would at the same time satisfy Greece’s EU partners. See Taksiki Antepithesi (Omada Anarchikon kai Kommouniston) (2019). At the moment of writing Mr Plevris is the Minister of Health with the New Democracy government. 63 101