November 11, 2024 - 10:00am
On 25 January 2015, a charismatic Left-winger called Alexis Tsipras led his party to victory in the Greek general election. It was a galvanising moment, not just in Greece, but for the Left across Europe. For the first time in decades, one of their own — a full-on anti-capitalist — had won at the ballot box and would form a new government. The Owen Jones take was headlined: “this is what the politics of hope looks like.”
For a moment, one could feel the foundations of neoliberalism trembling. But today it is Tsipras’s party Syriza that lies in ruins. Having lost power in 2019, Syriza has been spiralling downwards ever since. Politico reported this weekend on the latest disaster for the movement — a damaging and possibly terminal split.
Tsipras resigned as leader last year, to be replaced by Stefanos Kasselakis, a former Goldman Sachs trader who predictably proved an awkward fit. Forced out by a motion of no confidence earlier this year, Kasselakis was then banned from running in fresh leadership elections. In response, he has formed his own party, taking several Syriza members of parliament with him.
Thanks to this latest schism, Syriza may now lose its status as the largest opposition party. To add insult to injury, this would be lost to Pasok-Kinal — a descendant of the once dominant centre-left party that Syriza had previously driven to the brink of extinction. Indeed, Syriza’s triumph over its rival was so complete that the word “Pasokification” was coined to describe the decline of social democratic parties across Europe. But now, in Greece, that process is unwinding — to Syriza’s humiliation.
So, where did it all go wrong? The answer, of course, is Brussels — or, to be more exact, Frankfurt, where the European Central Bank (ECB) is headquartered.
Syriza came to power as a result of the eurozone crisis. In an attempt to save the single currency, the ECB imposed extreme austerity on the most heavily indebted member countries, especially Greece. Tsipras was elected on a wave of popular fury — a result which was underlined by the 2015 referendum, in which Greek voters overwhelmingly rejected the draconian conditions attached to the EU’s proposed bailout.
It was a case of people power versus central bankers — but the bankers won. Tsipras was forced to accept a deal that was even harsher than the one rejected in the referendum. It took a while for the full consequences to be felt, but from that moment Syriza was doomed.
For conservatives, this was a tragedy — the inevitable outcome of too much debt and surrendering one’s national currency to foreigners. But for the Left, it should have been a revolutionary moment — an opportunity to put people before profit, the working class before capital.
Why didn’t the Left-wing parties and trade unions of Europe mobilise in support of Syriza and the Greek people? Where were the mass demonstrations and general strikes? Outside of Greece, nowhere. It was a moment of genuine vulnerability for the neoliberal order — or at least that part of it contained within the institutions of the European Union — but the activists sat on their hands.
Today, the European Left is fragmented. Some progressive parties, especially the various Green parties, are still content to work within the European Union framework despite the growing strength of their enemies on the populist Right. With barriers to immigration going up across the continent, it’s going to be increasingly hard for pro-EU Left-wingers to explain where the progress they seek is going to come from.
Other, more Eurosceptic parts of the Left, such as Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s LFI in France and the surviving Corbynites in Britain, focus on favoured foreign policy causes like Palestine and building a power base among ethnic-minority communities at home. An increasingly dissident tendency of the Left is developing in a populist direction, with Sahra Wagenknecht’s party in Germany the prime example, alongside similar movements such as Course of Freedom in Greece.
If this seems like an incoherent mess, that’s because it is. The Left has always been at its most effective when it has a grand cause to unify it. An all-out fight against the austerity regime imposed on Greece could have been the struggle of a generation, but instead of solidarity when it really mattered, Syriza and the Greek people were left to their fate.
Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.
peterfranklin_
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribePlease don’t tell Yannis Varoufakis that Syriza has collapsed, it might be too much following on from Trump winning. We don’t want a medical emergency.
On the contrary, Varoufakis will be delighted. He soon learned that Tsipras was a thick, unemployed charlatan, full of hot air and bravado, who cracked under pressure.
Greek debt spiraled due to an oversized, unproductive public sector that stifled inovation, a private sector fully dependant on public works that led to huge corruption, and buy out of voters by providing untenable pensions and other benefits.
Syriza rode on the wave of public resentment, but had no actual plan to restart the economy other than demanding a full debt cancellation, buying cheap oil from Venezuela and cheap loans from Rusia and other former communist countries.
When faced with reality they tried to blackmail EU but miserably failed.
To be fair to them (mainly Varoufakis who was the only knowledgeable minister), what they were asking for (printing of billions of euros out of thin air) happened a few years later during covid, so they were unlucky in their timing – still a suicidal solution, but one that later the entire EU implemented.
You forgot one thing – Greece’s inability to run a viable tax system.
What was the name of that Greek town that had the highest concentration of Porsche Cayennes in Europe? All obtained on the never never.
The ‘Left’ has a significant problem – it’s po-faced morality. It’s more interested in policy through-puts (which must be pure) than real-world outputs (which might not be). As long as the Euro-left continues larping the ‘Peoples Front of Judea’ a la ‘Life of Brian’, their irrelevance will increase. Which, to be honest, is probably a good thing.
I agree with every word of this, except your first “it’s” because I’m a grammar pedant.
Somebody needs to be!
Libens hoc onus Sisypheanum sumo.
Why do pedants never give their alternative to the linguistical crime.
“Its”.
Splitters!
It’s partly at least because the Left largely support the European Union, or the vague idea of it, while its often autocratic policies and lack of accountability are ignored, no doubt because it is “on the right side of history” or something.
I agree, I think that’s the reason. In the UK Labour was at first anti-EU but in 1988 Jacques Delors, president of the EU Commission, persuaded them that the EU was a backdoor means of neutering Thatcherism. How could they resist? Conversely, eurocepticism then started to grow among the Conservatives.
Ah, yes. Jacques “Up Yours” Delors….
Greece should not have adopted the euro.
More than anything a currency is a pricing mechanism. By adopting the euro, the Greeks deprived themselves of the ability to price their greatest assets: sunshine and sandy beaches. You just have to look at the surge in tourism to Turkey that accompanied the decline in travel to Greece that followed almost immediately on replacement of the drachma, to see what a disastrous decision it was. And remains.
The fact that Greece stayed in the eurozone confirmed for me that the true purpose of the euro has always been to lock member states irrevocably in the EU. The costs and risks of leaving the eurozone would be truly horrific. Of course, the euro could be destroyed by uncontrollable events.
We live in hope …
It was nothing to do with the euro. Greek hoteliers, restaurant and bar owners just doubled their prices. In my resort of choice, 90% of the tourists were Austrian. They disappeared after the first summer of the euro, and have never returned.
Syriza will be happy now. The hard (old) Left don’t actually want to be in power because it always exposes the inherent flaws and contradictions of their belief-set. They don’t really want to govern, because in reality, they know they can’t, and they know they’re happier hurling abuse at those who can.
The self-styled “liberal Left” progressives are a very different animal. They want power, but they know that they’ll rarely get it. So thier method is by institutional capture of other parties, as we’ve seen here with both the Conservatives, and Labour.
The bigoted illiberal “liberal progressives” are the dangerous ones. The old hard left’s just a rather nasty and unfunny comedy act.
Your comment deserves many more upvotes.
In alberta we call them dippers, double dippers and mean old dippers.
I think something crucial that this article misses out on is the pivot that has happened on the definition of ‘left’ and ‘right’ in Western politics since 2015. In fact, it could be argued that those causes the author outlines in the article have been adopted by the right of the current political dichotomy. From Le Pen in France, AfD in Germany, Reform in the UK and, of course, Trump in America, the right is now the anti-establishment, pro working class side in many cases.
The new definition of left and right seems to be drawn along the lines of Globalism (left) vs Nationalism (right) and without acknowleding such a change the article seems less significant.
I think of the right/left distinction more in terms of classical liberalism vs collectivism. In this sense, the conservatism of parties like Reform isn’t inherently right-wing. Indeed, the conservatism originally envisaged by Burke and Peel was a coalition of landed gentry and working class interests against the mercantile/capitalist classes. Both of the Conservative Party’s splits – over the Corn Laws in the 1840’s and over tariffs in the early 1900’s – saw the free-traders under the banners of, respectively, Peel and Joseph Chamberlain migrating to the Liberals, and the protectionists left in control of the Tory rump.
“I think of the right/left distinction more in terms of classical liberalism vs collectivism.”
… which corresponds fairly closely to your globalism vs nationalism alignment. The difference between you and I is that you see this phenomenon as new, whereas I see it as a return to the status quo ante.
Thanks Peter, would like to have heard something in here about where conservatives in Greece currently stand.
‘The Left has always been at its most effective when it has a grand cause to unify it.’ And every ‘grand unifying cause’ has gone down in flames, burning the people it was supposed to serve, and thoroughly discrediting Left wing ideology in the process. Look at the Democrats’ ‘progressive’ policies in the US. Except that for a small minority, the inconvenient facts must be denied, evaded, smokescreened, and misdirected. Look at the Democrats and their cheerleaders desperately trying to assign Trump’s win to racism, sexism, voter stupidity, fascism, Nazism, hankering back to slavery, right wing propaganda, Biden, Harris, ‘incumbency’, whatever that is, and so on. Anything but their own toxic and damaging ideology.
If you’re ever on the maiden voyage of a luxury cruise ship which is hit by a tidal wave, my advice is to listen very carefully to which way Owen Jones says to go to reach the surface, then head in the opposite direction.
“Why didn’t the Left-wing parties and trade unions of Europe mobilise in support of Syriza and the Greek people? Where were the mass demonstrations and general strikes?”
Seriously? When did this kind of thing ever happen outside of a student revolutionary handbook?
This isn’t complicated actually. The US exported it’s own racial politics of the left to Europe. The American left has always been pro-immigration and almost as laissez-faire as the right. There’s also the anti-racism and DEI nonsense that started over here as well. Moreover, the American left has never been anywhere near as labor oriented or socialistic as the European left traditionally has been. The European left has basically been pulled to far towards the globalist center and the blob has taken over those parties. Like the American left, they’re no longer a party of workers and unions. They’re all internationalists who would do anything to save the EU, including sacrificing some of the members. They were never going to come to the aid of any party that threatened their precious unity and common currency. Whatever serious progress is made will probably have to come with anti-EU parties and the real threat to break up the union. Nothing short of the prospect of losing their financial empires built on the Euro will dislodge the bankers.
The key points are not mentioned in this article.
Tsipras was an EU-agent operating Syriza as controlled opposition. He was astonished when the Greeks voted against accepting the EU’s deal and did not know what to do.
The Greeks did not vote for a domestic redistribution of wealth. They voted in favour of the rest of the EU giving them even more money, never thinking that the rest of the EU would decline the Greeks’ kind offer of wasting their money. When offered the possibility of leaving European Monetary Union, they decided to keep their bank deposits denominated in Euros, because leaving the Euro would lead to an immediate downward revaluation of those deposits. They decided to stay in the EU because they preferred to keep the transfer of income from the rest of the EU.
The rest of the EU did nothing because they either could not acknowledge the true anti-democratic nature of the EU or because they didn’t see the Greeks as proper Europeans.
The Greeks learned a lesson that is sometimes painful: If you borrow money, you have to pay it back.
It all comes down to the single currency. Progressive forces were not prepared to challenge it because people like it because, in turn, it is convenient rather than good monetary policy. They forgot that with debit and credit cards the inconvenience of changing currencies while on holidays disappears.
“It was a case of people power versus central bankers — but the bankers won. Tsipras was forced to accept a deal that was even harsher than the one rejected in the referendum“. Yes, I remember that. I laughed and laughed when it happened.