By John
Psaropoulos
Syriza, the
Radical Left Coalition, came to power on January 25 with 36.3 percent of the
vote. It rules in coalition with the right-wing Independent Greeks, with which
it shares a populist, anti-austerity agenda. It is Greece’s first predominantly
leftwing government, and claims to be the vanguard of a Europe-wide revolution
against austerity.
Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’ central election promise is simple: to
restore Greek sovereignty and growth. To do this, he wants to redirect the
country’s sliver of surplus wealth from overseas creditors to the poor and
battered middle class. And to achieve that, he has to negotiate a new treaty
with Greece’s creditors – the European Central Bank, the European Commission
and the International Monetary Fund.
Five years of
government spending cuts mandated by Greece’s creditors balanced the budget in
2013 for the first time in decades. The fact that the Greek state now lives
within tax revenues weakens the argument for further borrowing, whose sole
purpose is to pay off older debt.
Syriza argues
that austerity has done its job and cannot be a prescription for the growth
Greece now needs in order to pay off its 321bn euro debt (175 percent of GDP).
On the contrary, it has deepened
a recession that claimed a quarter of the Greek economy and produced
unemployment of 25 percent – something the
IMF revealed in a controversial paper in 2013.
“The biggest loan in human history was given on condition that incomes
would shrink, and from these shrinking incomes debts both old and new would
have to be repaid,” said incoming finance minister Yianis Varoufakis on his
first day on the job. “It didn’t take an economist to see that … we’d
repeatedly fail to graduate from this process.”
Tsipras wants to
provide food and electricity to dispossessed households; extend healthcare to those who
have lost their coverage – an estimated quarter of the population; and restore
pensions that have been reduced. He insists that he does not aim to recreate
deficits to fund this.
But Greece remains
precariously perched. Tax revenues fell sharply in late 2014, producing a
smaller than forecast primary surplus of 1.8bn euros.
“I think that the
government faces a very difficult task because Greece has funding needs of more
than 20bn euros this year,” says Miranda Xafa, Greece’s former representative
to the IMF. “Syriza has chosen the path of
confrontation that could lead to an accident that would take the form of a
default on the payment of the external debt. And the next step would be social
unrest, capital flight and eventually Grexit,” she says using an abbreviated
term for “Greek exit” from the Eurozone.
Humble
beginnigs
Syriza was founded as an
electoral alliance between the Moscow-oriented Greek Communist Party (KKE) and
the Eurocentric communists of the Greek Left. As the Coalition of the Left and of Progress (Synaspismos), they
took an impressive 13 percent of the vote in June 1989.
The fall of
communism the following year split them between Stalinists and reformists. The
former retreated to the KKE. The reformists turned Synaspismos into a political
party. Throughout the 1990s, both groups fought for political survival in low,
single-digit figures.
It was not
until 2006, when party leader Alekos Alavanos campaigned against higher
education reform, that Synaspismos, now renamed Syriza, really saw a chance of
appealing to an audience outside the traditional left. It soared to 17 percent
approval ratings in some opinion polls, yet still scored only five percent of
the vote in the 2007 election.
“The party’s
gains in 2007 may not have been great but Syriza was already beginning to exert
an influence on the more radical wing of Pasok, which saw their party’s
stagnation and dead end,” says former Syriza leader Alekos Alavanos.
In 2008, he
passed on the leadership to the 30 year-old Alexis Tsipras, a civil engineering
graduate who had already shown a vocation for politics. As a member of the
communist youth and president of his school’s student body in 1991, he had led
school sit-ins in protest against the conservative government’s education
reforms, helping to defeat them.
“[Tsipras]
understood that people wanted a change of political personnel, a new
generation. He had been [party] secretary for youth which means he was more
charismatic than the other candidates,” says Alavanos.
Meteoric
rise, ideological drift
Under Tsipras,
Syriza dared to read the crisis as an opportunity to beat the two-party system.
Socialist Prime
Minister George Papandreou signed onto Greece’s first, 100bn euro facilitation
loan in May 2010. By November 2011 he had resigned, after reaching an impasse
with creditors over a slew of austerity measures. An interim technocratic
government was installed under former central banker Loukas Papademos. Its job
was to force austerity measures through parliament, negotiate a 100bn euro
discount of Greek debt in private hands, sign onto a second 140bn euro loan and
declare elections.
Under pressure
from European leaders, conservative New Democracy leader Antonis Samaras – a
bailout denouncer - joined the socialists in supporting the Papademos
government.
The May 2012
elections were a political earthquake. New Democracy had suffered by abandoning
its anti-bailout stance; but the socialists had fallen from 44 percent of the
popular vote in 2009 to just 13.18 percent. They had been replaced as the
leading centre-left force by Syriza, which rebounded from the brink of
political extinction to claim 16.78 percent, quadrupling its 2009 vote.
Not only was
Greece’s two-party system over. With some 45 percent of the vote going to
anti-bailout parties, Greece had produced a hung parliament and could not
govern itself. In vain, Samaras and new socialist leader Evangelos Venizelos
tried to convince Tsipras to join them in a pro-bailout coalition. The
week-long wooing of Tsipras only cemented his status as the new political force
to be reckoned with.
In a rematch
the following month, Greeks voted their fear of default only marginally above
their loathing of austerity. New Democracy came out ahead with 29.66 percent of
the vote, but Syriza leapt forward by ten points to become the main opposition
party.
The tectonic
shift was now complete. New Democracy had replaced the socialists as the
principal Europeanist party, and Syriza had replaced New Democracy as the
principal bailout denouncers.
Why
Syriza?
“Syriza, did a
very clever thing in 2012,” says Alavanos. “It was the only party that talked
about an alternative government. The Greeks were looking for an alternative.”
Alavanos says the Greek Communist Party (KKE) could have stepped into the
breach “but the KKE doesn’t do politics; it just wants to protect its
ideological base.”
Less explicable
to Alavanos is why the right-wing Popular Orthodox Congress (LAOS) didn’t
occupy that space. “It had more votes than Syriza in 2009. It could have a
populist, right-wing, anti-capitalist rhetoric, and it could combine this with
an anti-immigration policy, which the left cannot do. It could be a [Marine] Le
Pen phenomenon.” LAOS instead joined the coalition backing the austerity
government of Papademos, and Greek voters voted it out of parliament.
Syriza had come
a long way not merely by becoming the people’s voice against austerity; what
gave it its edge is that it distinguished between pro-euro and pro-austerity
politics. An overwhelming majority of Greeks supported Greece’s remaining
within the Eurozone but not the austerity imposed by creditors.
In May 2012,
Syriza vowed never to jeopardise Greece’s euro membership. Between the May and
June elections it took another step towards the political centre: the party did
not oppose the bailout loans that keep Greece afloat, it said; merely the
austerity memoranda that accompany them. In dropping the threat of a unilateral
default, Syriza crossed the line from pure bailout denunciator to bailout
re-negotiator, seizing New Democracy’s more nuanced electoral platform.
This shift was
emphasised in this year’s election. “We belong to the European family and we
are going to find a solution together,” said Syriza’s chief economist, Yiannis Milios.
“No one wants to destroy the other. We will not default. We will cooperate.”
Syriza has
replaced the threat of unilateral default with political correctness. “You’re worried
that if a Syriza government comes along… the almighty Germans or whoever else
will chop off our head, stick it on a pike and carry it around saying, ‘here’s
what happens to people who vote for Syriza’,” Deputy Prime Minister Yiannis
Dragasakis recently told a panel of fellow-economists. “Does anyone believe
that such a Europe has any kind of future?”
Nuance
and omission
Syriza’s rise
to a potential ruling party had other, far-reaching effects on its message
after 2012. A civil disobedience movement called “den plirono” (“I won’t pay”)
had burgeoned during the crisis, as many Greeks started driving through
motorway toll posts without paying. The campaign opposed extraordinary taxes
levied during the crisis and even utility bills.
Syriza actively
encouraged it. When financial fraud inspectors arrested a restauranteur on the
island of Hydra for failing to issue receipts in August 2012, Syriza MPs applauded the
local population for
besieging them in the local police precinct. Theodoros Dritsas, now minister of
the merchant marine, deplored the police “display of authoritarianism”.
In early
November, however, Syriza held a party congress to consolidate its positions
and muffle many of its more extreme voices. It quickly dropped its exhortations
for civil disobedience, espousing by November 22 “fair and proportional” toll charges
“with discounts for frequent users”. This change in stance helped the
conservative government to create a 2.9bn euro primary surplus in 2013, but
displeased many on the party’s left fringe.
“The point of
the 2012 congress was to turn a collection of components into a party and
[Tsipras] succeeded in that,” says Vasilis Karasmanis, a philosophy professor
and political observer at the Athens Polytechnic. “The components are an anachronism.”
The party’s
rise to power also led it to quietly drop its opposition to a 50-seat bonus the
current electoral law awards to the first party in the 300-seat legislature.
(The remaining 250 seats are awarded on a proportional basis to the parties
that clear a three percent threshold). The measure is designed to strengthen
the chances of a government being formed, but while Syriza was a fringe party
it demanded proportional representation across the board – a traditional
leftwing mantra.
Syriza’s
argument was that the bonus has helped propagate the two-party system, enabling
the socialists and conservatives to rule Greece alternately for the last 40
years. Syriza Euro-MP Manolis Glezos, embarrassed
the party last October, when he repeated the traditional party position:
“We will try to persuade the Greek people to elect us without the bonus. But if
we win with the bonus, as we’ve said before, we will immediately abolish this
electoral law and declare repeat elections, which will be a simple battle
without deceit.” Karasmanis calls
Syriza’s silent acceptance of the 50 seat bonus now “an ideological about-turn
of the first order”.
Although it kept
its 2012 manifesto for this election, Syriza de-emphasised major commitments.
It stopped talking about nationalising the banking system and handing it over
to co-operatives, where it would be re-purposed to deliver liquidity to small
and medium-sized enterprises. (Interviewed shortly before the election, Milios
said “the
banks are nowadays stable. They have passed the stress tests of Black Rock and
the European Central Bank. They belong to the Eurosystem of banks and they are
being overlooked by the ECB.”)
Syriza also
stopped talking about taxing the rich at 75 percent, up from the current 45
percent, fearing capital flight. It moved towards the middle class and stopped
talking about raising taxes on businesses: more than 90 percent of employment
in Greece comes from some 400,000 small and medium-sized enterprises. Gone,
too, is talk of renationalising any privatised state companies.
Syriza, in short, has transitioned to a more
centre-left position and taken over the socialist party’s voter base. It is
ideologically palatable to the Greek mainstream. But voters are waiting to see
whether it wins its three big gambles; to reach a new testament with creditors
within the European family; to achieve growth and create jobs; and to spend up
to 11bn euros a year on a social safety net.
February 2015
