It had tried to shield the old and poor from the worst of it, but at the cost of taxing the middle class, the rich, and the country’s vital tourist trade. It met the targets of the European Central Bank, privatised the ports and airports, played an exemplary game in international politics, and spent more of its GDP on Nato commitments than any other member.

In the end, many of its supporters stayed at home, while the far-right vote switched back to the conservatives, and Syriza lost power – scoring 31.5%, compared with 40% for the centre-right New Democracy party.

For the some on the far Left, the fall of Syriza government is the termination of an embarrassment. Alexis Tsipras led the party to power in 2015 on a promise to resist austerity but after a few nail-biting months was forced into abject retreat, with the country’s banks closed, chaos on the streets and vital services only a few days away from failure.

Suggested reading

Time's up for Greece's populist demagogue

By David Patrikarakos

For me, however, there are positives to take away that have implications for the entire project of the global Left. First, Tsipras showed that with a clear narrative, a message of hope and some competent advisers, the far-Left’s project can work in government. The oligarchy, whose two-party system (Pasok and New Democracy) collapsed, expected Syriza to be amateurs: in fact they brought professionalism and openness to an endemically corrupt and chaotic state.

Second, by being radical in opposition, and refusing to give up radicalism even when forced into retreat, Syriza and the wider Greek Left defeated one of the most violent and open fascist threats in the European continent. Its conservative predecessors had tolerated Golden Dawn’s infiltration of the police, and murderous violence on the streets. Without a Left prepared to risk taking power, Greece would have degenerated into a battleground of populisms.

Third, Syriza supplanted the traditional Greek social democratic party Pasok as the “natural” party of Left government. Its spokespeople, pundits and aligned senior journalists now inhabit the Greek airwaves and cultural life.

Finally, the shock of seeing the Left in power has changed – for now – the behaviour of the Greek conservatives. They were forced to exchange ageing playboys and oligarchs for politicians who look cleaner and more restrained.

Suggested reading

How Europe smothered the radical Left

By Peter Franklin

On the downside, the experience of the 2015 “Greek Spring” proved beyond doubt that, within the Eurozone, the political space for a radical Left government will always be constrained. You can defy the Maastricht rules on public finance – as Italy’s Matteo Salvini is doing now – but if you do so in combination with a radical shift of power and wealth towards the people, the coercive force of the central bank will be used against you.

To understand where the radical Left goes next, you have to understand how modest its achievements have been outside Greece, and how its enemy has changed.

In Spain, the advance of Podemos-Unidos, an alliance of traditional communists with the new “horizontal” activist movement that sprung up in 2011, has stalled. After scoring 14% in April’s general election, its leader Pablo Iglesias is now forced to be a junior and inconsequential coalition partner in the socialist-led government. The same rough arrangement applies to the Left Bloc in Portugal – currently polling 9%. In Denmark, another electoral pact between the far-Left and social democrats has put the latter in power.

In Finland, a general shift to the Left has put the radical Left Alliance into a broad governing coalition with Greens, Social Democrats and Liberals. Germany’s Left Party, born out of the former ruling communist party, survives on around 9%, and plays a leading role in the “Red-Red-Green” government of the Berlin region.

Suggested reading

The heat is on for Greece

By DAVID PATRIKARAKOS

In general, overtly anti-capitalist Left parties have peaked below 20% as the memory of the financial crisis fades, while a shift to the Left by traditional social democrats has stemmed their own decline.

But the political forces emerging out of the 20^thcentury Left face two new challenges: the so-called Green Wave, which has swelled the electoral support of Green parties everywhere; and a growing electoral threat from far right or overtly racist parties, some of which are building support among the working class communities where the Left used to be strong.

Syriza, Podemos and the rest prospered after 2008 because their politics, and to an extent their style, resonated with the mood of anger as deep austerity followed the bailout of the banks. Faced with a crisis of consent for democracy, the rule of law and human rights, the whole Left – including both Marxists and social democrats – is being forced to make choices it wanted to avoid.

The first hard choice is between redistribution and saving the planet. Orthodox Left doctrine tells you this does not have to be a choice, and that the challenge of rapid decarbonisaton should be an opportunity for the Left to sell – indeed to converge around – its well-worn projects of state direction and intervention. But to capture the imagination of the young people involved in the US Sunrise Movement, or Fridays for Future in Europe and Extinction Rebellion here, the order of precedence has to be clear.

Suggested reading

Who broke the Left?

By Giles Fraser

In future, Left-wing parties will need to look and sound like they care about the planet more than anything else – and the truth is, our tradition has not always done so. The closer you remain to the traditional working class communities which prospered during the carbon era, the harder it is to walk the walk when it comes to zero carbon.

When it comes to the far-right threat, the Left should be on firmer territory. The very prestige of parties such as Podemos, Syriza and Die Linke rests on the leading role their communist predecessors played in the struggle against fascism in the 1930s. But today’s far Left is reluctant to make the big tactical change their grandparents’ generation made when faced with Hitler and Franco.

In the 1930s, faced with the rise of fascism, Stalin ordered Western communist parties to form “Popular Front” coalitions with liberal and conservative parties. By 1936, those governments controlled both France and Spain. You could even argue that the spirit of the Popular Front animated Attlee’s decision to join Churchill’s wartime coalition in May 1940.

But leaders like Pablo Iglesias in Spain, or Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France, have invested so much personal energy in fighting the liberal centrist parties that they cannot bring themselves to make the same kind of overt, strategic change of priorities. And there is no Stalin to bang their heads together.

Suggested reading

The permanent punishment of the Greek people

By Peter Franklin

As a result the strategic hopes of the global Left now lie with two veteran leaders who have chosen their own long march through the institutions: Jeremy Corbyn here and Bernie Sanders in the USA. Whereas Syriza had to destroy Greek social democracy in order to replace it, Corbyn and Sanders chose to take over their respective centre-Left parties.

But Corbyn and Sanders face effectively the same dilemma as the rest. To enact a radical programme they need power; to gain power they need a story of hope to energise the poor, competence enough to mobilise middle class voters and – for the youth – to look and sound like climate change is their number one priority. Like Tsipras, they need to jettison the most extreme “anti-imperialist” obsessions of some of their activists.

And as Tsipras discovered, doing all that only gets you into office. Once there, you have to take on the real power: the financial markets, hedge funds, oligarchs and organised criminals who believe they can make and destroy governments at whim.

The sheer scale of the climate crisis will, as the 20^th century recedes and the IPCC’s decarbonisation targets become pressing, change the priorities of the Left. The far-Left is now either in reluctant coalition with its social democrat and Green allies, or resisting even that. For me, the 21^stcentury equivalent of the Popular Front would be an alliance of all forces prepared to commit to spending the hundreds of billions we’ll need to combat climate change, plus the absolute defence of democracy and the rule of law, plus the reversal of austerity. The renationalisation of energy and transport infrastructure is implicit in any radical plan to halve net carbon over the next ten years.

Paradoxically, the most tactically adept Left politician on the planet remains Tsipras, though he is despised by Mélenchon and publicly avoided by Corbyn. Tsipras just survived a four-year crash course in the language of priorities and came out with 31.5% of the vote (with a further 8% actually going to parties to the Left of him). Above all he made a government of the far-Left thinkable, in one of the most polarised democracies in Europe. That’s what I think the minister meant by “losing nicely”.

The migrant peddlers from Africa, the Middle East and South Asia hawk their rip-off DVDs and trinkets with uncharacteristic lethargy. Punters sit in canvas-covered chairs outside cafes; they drink iced lattes; they talk; they sweat.

Greeks have begun the long descent towards holiday season, a near-ritualistic time in this part of the Mediterranean, which reaches its peak in August. Regular temperatures of close to 40 degrees empty Athens of its inhabitants, who scurry eagerly to island hotspots. But this year is different. The country is gearing up for a general election on Sunday, and it could not be more important.

The election marks the first time Greeks will go to the polls since the height of the financial crisis in 2015. This was when fears that the country might tumble out of the Eurozone, and – though an unlikely scenario – the European Union, caused political and financial tremors from Brussels to Washington.

The far-Left and populist Syriza party emerged victorious twice that same year. Its first victory was in January, after a campaign that promised to tell the so-called Troika (a decision group comprising the European Commission, European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund) to get stuffed. Second in September, to ratify its decision to accept even more austerity measures from the Troika after its (obviously doomed from the outset) attempts to take it on failed.

Suggested reading

The permanent punishment of the Greek people

By Peter Franklin

Now, almost four years later, the centre-Right opposition party New Democracy looks almost certain to win – a result that will have severe ramifications, not only for Greece, but almost certainly for Europe as well.

The domestic implications of this are clear. As journalist Yiannis Baboulias, tells me: “Politically, Greece has moved from the anti-austerity financial-based narratives and conflict of the past decade to a political space in which culture wars now dominate.”

In this sense, Greece is merely reflecting a Europe-wide trend – not least the UK’s internal divisions over Brexit. As Baboulias also points out, it was Syriza that set the scene for this state of affairs with its pre-2015, highly populist and ludicrously unrealistic anti-austerity narrative.

Now, New Democracy has continued the populist trend, but from the other extreme, with a scattergun deployment of hard-Right tropes regarding migrants and LGBTQ issues. And as far as they are concerned, Syriza are hardcore communists who will turn Greece into Venezuela.

Meanwhile, an exhausted society looks on, either angry or apathetic.

“Society has been decimated by austerity and humiliated politically. It’s a dangerous mix,” says Baboulias. “Syriza didn’t manage to be the anti-austerity champion it promised to be and New Democracy has capitalised on that.”

But most alarming of all is New Democracy’s virulent opposition to the June 2018 Prespa Agreement – the treaty that saw North Macedonia change its name in return for Greece dropping objections to the country’s NATO accession.

Suggested reading

Time's up for Greece's populist demagogue

By David Patrikarakos

The Macedonia dispute is the archetypal 21st-century culture war. At its heart sit questions of identity, nationality, and the weaponisation of history, from Alexander the Great to the wording of treaties. Sizeable chunks of Greeks and North Macedonians are also unhappy with the new status quo.

And so into this potent and volatile societal mix comes Russia. The Kremlin’s nightmare since the end of the Cold War has been encirclement by NATO, and to a lesser degree, EU states. North Macedonia is meanwhile preparing to join the NATO alliance.

Yet, no matter how unhappy it is with the Prespa Agreement, New Democracy will almost certainly not abrogate an international treaty that has been passed by the Greek parliament and is backed by the EU, the US and NATO. It can, however, drag its feet and hold up the process. In particular, it can cause problems when it comes to its neighbour’s desire to join the EU – which Russia will do everything in its power to encourage.

During the Prespa talks, Kremlin disinformation flooded Greece, both at an overt level with the Greek RT and Sputnik channels broadcasting incessantly against the deal, and more covertly as trolls and bots flooded the social media ecosystem with coordinated attacks on both it and Syriza. It is even alleged that the Russian-Greek oligarch Ivan Savvidis paid hooligans in both countries to stage violent protests against the agreement – charges he denies.

With an anti-Prespa New Democracy in power, the Kremlin’s position on North Macedonia will align almost perfectly with that of the Greek government.

Meanwhile, the country is facing an increasingly problematic figure in Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s sitting president. Erdoğan is in political trouble, having been dealt a blow after his chosen candidate for mayor of Istanbul, Binali Yildirim, was defeated in local elections earlier in March by opposition candidate Ekrem Imamoglu, by a 54% majority.

Suggested reading

Europe's biggest test yet

By Matt Goodwin

A sure-fire way of uniting Turks is to take up sabre-rattling against Greeks. A critical test for any new Greek government will be handling a potential crisis with Turkey in the next few months. For that to succeed, there must be at least some degree of unity in the country.

Will Kyriakos Mitsotakis, New Democracy’s leader, be able to bring this? He is an able, liberal-minded politician who is keen to overhaul much of the entrenched statism that has caused Greece so much damage. He is pro-business and he is dynamic. He is also the sane face of a party that contains many elements that could be described – charitably – as falling “within the alt-right ambit”.

The trouble is, Greece may still not be ready for the type of tough free market measures New Democracy wants to deploy. It has promised, among other things, to cut taxes for corporations, reduce the size of the state and re-introduce fees in public hospitals. There is much to be said for these measures. The question remains however: are they realistic?

“New Democracy has promised to cut taxes for corporations, reduce the size of the state, re-introduce fees in public hospitals and other measures reminiscent of the agenda that brought down their 2012-14 government headed by Samaras,”  says Baboulias. “But this time there is no Syriza to challenge them. I’m afraid that without an alternative political outlet through which to channel the anger that these policies will generate, the rage will spill out into the streets. Again.”

Further Reading

What Labour could learn from the Greeks

By David Patrikarakos

If this happens, we will have come full circle. Four years of austerity and pain will have achieved nothing. And meanwhile, other forces are at work. Roderick Beaton observes in his 2019 book Greece: Biography of a Modern Nation, the fate of the Greeks is, as ever, woven into the decision of the other powers. The years that followed the 1821-32 War of Independence, he argues, can be seen as a cycle of repeating patterns of political conflict, social change and economic upheaval. History has already borne out his thesis – the future will almost certainly reinforce it.

In Exarchia, the hawkers continue to wearily ply their trade among the many cafes and restaurants that dot the area’s central street grid. In between shooing them away from his customers, Yiorgos, a cafe waiter, has spent all day serving iced coffee and cold beer to locals and tourists alike.

He is going to vote on Sunday, though feels it is hardly worth it. “In 2015 I voted for Syriza because I was desperate, but nothing has really changed,” he explains.

“This time I’ll vote for New Democracy – pretty much for the same reason.” But he doesn’t expect much. “In the end,” he concludes “all these bastards are the same.”