Professor Sofia Vasilopoulou traced Greece's far right from the margins to prominence, and asked whether reading it as a crisis reaction explains anything at all.
Sofia Vasilopoulou, Professor of European Politics at King’s College London, spoke on the rise of Greece’s far right at the Hellenic Centre in Marylebone on Wednesday 8 October 2025. The Anglo-Hellenic League hosted the evening.
She took her PhD at the LSE in 2011 and worked at the University of York from 2011 to 2022, where she remains an Honorary Professor. Her research asks why publics turn against the mainstream, and how that dissatisfaction is shaped into party strategy.
The Golden Dawn’s Nationalist Solution, written with Daphne Halikiopoulou in 2015, traced how an avowedly neo-Nazi party built a parliamentary bloc out of Greece’s crisis years. Her 2018 book, Far Right Parties and Euroscepticism: Patterns of Opposition, set out a comparative framework.
At the Hellenic Centre she looked past the crisis explanation itself. She read electoral trends, published policy positions and campaign messaging across several Greek far-right parties rather than one. Their persistence and diversification, she argued, point to political and cultural currents deeper than any single election cycle.
She is vice-Chair of the COST Action project Linking Euroscepticism and Populism, which tracks the same pattern across the rest of Europe.