Syriza victory opens up a new chapter for the left
Simon Hardy writes from Athens.
The radical left anti-austerity party Syriza has won the Greek election and people across Greece are cheering.
The experience in Greece is incredible. People came out into the squares of Athens and started to celebrate. Being in the capital with thousands of Syriza supporters from all over Europe is the most wonderful feeling. Hundreds of international supporters came to Athens to see this moment in history when the left took power in Greece.
Members of Left Unity were outside the Syriza campaign tent when the exit poll announced a Syriza win. The cheers and jubilation of the gathered activists was a roar that hasn’t been heard in a long time. A cheer for victory.
Looking around there was socialists from left parties, trade unions and social campaigns all across Europe, Germany, Portugal, Denmark, Italy, France, Spain and Switzerland, to name just the ones that I saw. Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras thanked the international delegations from the podium when he gave his victory speech.
But whilst people from across Europe saw this as a historic moment that they wanted to be part of and to try and emulate in their own countries, it is the Greek people themselves who were the ones that struck the blow against neoliberalism and austerity.
Speaking to people in Athens, the ones that voted Syriza all said very similar things – they were fed up with austerity, with cuts and cuts and more cuts. They were fed up with wages at rock bottom levels, with a collapsing healthcare system and escalating homelessness. The people of Greece have suffered the most from the European Union’s merciless demand for austerity. Now they have drawn a line in the sand and said ‘enough is enough’!
What next?
With 149 out of 300 MPs Syriza is just short of an overall majority, but the strength of its vote and the collapse in support of the social democratic PASOK party shows that Greek people are looking for change and want to left government to fight for their interests.
Syriza proposed an immediate programme of policies to alleviate some of the worst suffering of the Greek people. This includes raising the minimum wage back up to 2010 levels, restoring electricity to the thousands of (mostly elderly) people who can’t pay their bills and scrapping the hated property tax that left thousands of people homeless.
Previously in 2012 during the last election, the ruling elites and their media outlets conducted a campaign of fear and hate against Syriza, saying that in power they would wreck the country. There was a similar campaign this time round, though this time it didn’t have the desired effect. The Greek people have been lied to by the elites for too long: they were told to fear Syriza and the left and to put their faith in the conservative New Democracy or the hopelessly compromised pro-austerity PASOK. Fed up of the lies and false promises, the vote for Syriza increased as people flocked to a party that offered them a chance to fight back and not be subservient to the programme of the EU ruling powers.
In the final days of the campaign, several mainstream voices, including the biggest selling newspaper in Greece appeared to give up – they argued that yes, now it is Syriza’s turn and if the people want them as a government they should be given a chance.
This is a warning as much as anything. The capitalists hope that Syriza fails. They couldn’t beat them in the election any more so now they will try and destroy them another way.
Solidarity is needed
So now we can expect dirty tricks and underhand manoeuvering by the EU leaders, the European Central Bank and the Greek bosses themselves. They will try and force Syriza into an impossible situation whereby they are seen to betray the hopes of the people that elected them.
Part of this is because Greece is now on a collision course with the European Central Bank. Even if Syriza ends up backtracking on large parts of its policies under the pressure of government, it won’t be able to surrender enough for the elites, so it is possible that the ECB will pull the plug on lending to Greece as a way of trying to destroy the government. This could happen as early as 1st March.
What Greece will need now is active support from across the continent and beyond. Syriza will face pressure from below, as well as above. The leaders will be more likely to stand firm and fight back if they know that across Europe, across the world, there are solidarity campaigns that are putting pressure on the capitalists to respect the democratic wishes of the Greek people. The left in Greece will be further strengthened by similar parties, like Left Unity in Britain, making gains and helping to build the resistance in their own countries.
This is a new dawn for the radical left in Europe. The future path is uncertain and all manner of challenges lie ahead – but for now we can finally say that we won. We won a victory and we can start to turn the tide.
19 comments
19 responses to “Syriza victory opens up a new chapter for the left”
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Great news, indeed.
Just two things to ask;
1 The KKE seem to have polled 5.3% – is Tsipras considering them as coalition partners and should he, given that the alternatives are PASOK or another centrist party?
2 If Syriza fails to get the EU Central Bank and its compliant politicians to halve its debt, do the strong links established by Podemos with both Syiza and the Latin American Bolivarian regimes mean it could join the Latin American leftist economic bloc, which has its own oil supply via Venezuela, and thereby set up a trans-continental leftist alliance which might be very attractive to the Spanish and Portuguese voters who go to the polls later this year?
Syriza has taken votes and members from the KKE, people sick to death with it’s narrow rigidity and sectarian stupidity.
I dont think there is any chance of Syriza forming a coalition partner with the hardline stalinist KKE., who, of course, see themselves and themselves alone as the only true defenders of the Greek working class and as the Left opposition to Syriza.
Read recent articles in the Morning Star over the last few days to get a taste of the bitterness and hate the KKE , automatically shared by the CPB,already has for Syriza. Sectarian stupidity doesnt even get close !
Who knows what potential could be developed in relation to a Syriza Government and the Governments of Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador in particular. There lies the greater hope.Alexis Tsipras and members of Syriza have previously travelled and spent time in Latin America,on solidarity fact finding trips and building links with the Bolivarian Government Venezuela especially. Those links will be strengthened now !
FROM TODAY’S TELESUR WEBSITE:
Syriza won a massive victory in Greece’s parliamentary elections Sunday with leader Alexis Tsipras now the country’s prime minister.The Venezuelan government has congratulated Alexis Tsipras, the leader of the left-wing Syriza party, who won a massive victory in Greece’s parliamentary elections Sunday and has been inaugurated as the country’s prime minister.
“Venezuela warmly congratulates the Syriza coalition party and Alexis Tsipras for their historic victory, wishing them success and complete solidarity and support,” a government statement read.
Venezuelan Communities Minister Elias Jaua tweeted, “The Greek people, after a long and historic battle against neoliberalism, has crowned itself a wonderful victory. Syriza is fresh air for Europe!”
Tragically, the weird , but very well rooted in sections of the working class, “Third Period Stalinist “Greek Communist Party (KKE) will have nothing to do with Syriza. Its website makes it repeatedly clear that it views Syriza as merely a tool of the bourgeoisie – much like the Stalinised KPD disastrously did the Social Democrats in Germany from 1928 to 1935. This quote from the KKE website gives just a flavour of their utter contempt for Syriza :
“SYRIZA is not an alternative solution for the people. In its quest to win the elections, it has rapidly completed its transformation into a party of bourgeois anti-people management. It conceals the causes of the capitalist economic crisis and exonerates the exploitative face of capitalism, the power of capital.”
So because of the Stalinist version of vanguardist ultraleftism the KKE is ideologically trapped in, Syriza has had to go into coalition with the very dodgy right of centre Independent Greeks party – a party “opposed to the Austerity Programme of the Troika” BUT also saturated with Greek Orthodox fundamentalism and hostility to immigrants ! Not a good coalition partner for a radical Left government at all !
The KKE will rue the day it stabbed the Left in the back with its ridiculous sectarianism. If this government is destroyed by economic sabotage, fascist provocation – and even possibly yet another Colonels’ Coup eventually – the KKE will end up in the same Athens stadium as Syriza supporters.
Only by spreading the Greek socialist revival – to Spain and Portugal in particular – and starting a chain reaction across Europe , can the Syriza government be saved from either – selling out and leaving the way open to the radical fascist right, OR being smashed by utter economic devastation by the Troika powers – again most likely opening the way to a far right dictatorship.
Interesting point from John Tummon about the possibilities of an international dimension to a Greek economic strategy if Syriza fails to extract serious debt relief from the Troika.
This constructive approach is then followed by two of the most bitterly sectarian ultra-trotsykite rants by Patrick Black and (predicably) John Penney.
“Read recent articles in the Morning Star over the last few days to get a taste of the bitterness and hate the KKE , automatically shared by the CPB, already has for Syriza. Sectarian stupidity doesnt even get close !” says Patrick Black.
If he did, of course, he would have seen straight factual reporting plus Kevin Ovenden’s largely pro-Syriza full page feature followed by a response by the international department of the KKE.
From afar John Penney castigates the Greek Communists for being sectarian because they say that Syriza’a assurances to the IMF/ECB/EU troika that they remain committed to the EU, the euro and NATO because “It conceals the causes of the capitalist economic crisis and exonerates the exploitative face of capitalism, the power of capital.”
But Larry Elliot in the Guardian makes the same point in less partisan language:
“In Davos, the assumption was that even if the leftwing Syriza party wins the Greek election, its leader Alexis Tsipras, will quickly drop his hardline rhetoric and broadly continue with the current economic policy.”
http://www.theguardian.com/business/economics-blog/2015/jan/25/davos-inequality-root-cause-stagnation
Patrick opens with: ‘Syriza has taken votes and members from the KKE, people sick to death with it’s narrow rigidity and sectarian stupidity.’
This is a strange opening when one considers the simple fact that the KKE vote went UP from 4.5% to 5.5% and their number of MPs increased from 12 to 15. And this was on a clearly stated position of not participating in a coalition. The actual numbers of votes increasing from 227k to 338k since the last election of three years ago.
Two things are more important than the KKE with regards to Left Unity in my view:
Firstly, that Syriza has built a successful electoral party that includes large numbers of the organised left who remain as members of their own groups. In other words, people in Left Unity should not see others that are also organised in other parties or platforms as problematic; and
Secondly, we need a publicly stated LU view on the coalition with ANEL which is clearly a party of the right.
Comradely
Lee
““In Davos, the assumption was that even if the leftwing Syriza party wins the Greek election, its leader Alexis Tsipras, will quickly drop his hardline rhetoric and broadly continue with the current economic policy.””
This may well be true. Given their decision to jump into bed with the Independent Greeks, a right-wing capitalist party who are hostile to migrants.
For all their left-reformist rhetoric, that is their declaration of loyalty to the system.
“Assumptions” made by people at Davos relayed by the Guardian is now something to take note of?
Will the old left and its failures please play nicely. The old left has held us back with its ancient rhetoric, imagery and ideas, nowhere more than the UK.
They were useful 50 years ago – we genuinely thank them for all they did – but that time has gone. That model of communism, that model of socialism has gone. Did anyone expect time to stand still? Right in front of your eyes people are calling for a new left that wins, aspires, is pragmatic not dogmatic. One that wants to build mass movements, not enfeebled sects chasing their theoretical tails.
Please, join the new movements. You can help. Be us. Don’t fight us.
The Germans were in the doldrums in 90s and creation of Euro ensured they profited handsomely. They should have abolished voting in Greece if they wanted to impose economic genocide like their predecessors. Otherwise throw us out of EZ. Merkel will compromise she has no other option, Martin Schultz stated today.
The issue is how 2m jobs will be created.
Lee Rock and Nick Wright need to think a bit more before rushing into print. The slippery defenders of the abstentionist and hostile position of the KKE to Syriza ( very evident for a long time now – have a look at their website) , and now the new Syriza government, need to consider this question. Why is it that the most radical government in Europe since WW2 has had to cobble together a dodgy alliance with The Independent Greeks ? Because the KKE, with its Stalinist “Third Periodist” sectarian ultra vanguardism refuses to assist Syriza to push back the Neoliberal Austerity assault by offering it the votes of its MPs. Instead it, and its fellow travelling mini sects in the UK sit on their hands ,gleefully awaiting Syriza to fail – believing that somehow via that failure “their day will come”. A truly pitiful repeat of the Third Periodist tactical disaster of the KPD in 1928 to the Nazi takeover in 1933. Explain it away as much as you like guys -but the KKE is stabbing Syriza and the working class of Greece in the back through its strange Stalinist ultra-left politics. But then that’s what Stalinists always do.
John Penney’s allusion to the German KPD accusing the SPD of being a tool of the bourgeoisie is a crass, unhistorical parallel with the KKE and Syriza. In 1919, the Keil Mutiny was attacked by a force led by the SPD’s Noske; the SPD leader Ebert, in reply to Von Baden’s request for the SPD to stand with him against the social revolution, declared by Spartacist leader Liebnicht, replied that he hated the social revolution “like sin” and played a key part in plotting with Genral Groener to creat the Freikorps, a battalion of right wing mercenaries led by former imperial officers, with which to crush the rising of thr Spartacists and the Berlin Workers Council. Ebert’s Freikorps assassinated both Liebnicht and Rosa Luxemboug and chicked Red Rosa’s body in a canal. The SPD was factually & objectively counter-revolutionary. Syriza is not and its relationship with the only other party with a clear anti-austerity stance is purely tactical – its maintains full focus on the negotiations to come and provides a means of keeping Golden Dawn at bay during this difficult period.
John Penney really needs to make up his mind which fantasy world he wishes to inhabit. His super rrreveolutionary 30s in which a stormy European proletariat was constantly turned from its revolutionary path by perfidious Stalinists or the more tranquil present when the equally perfidious KKE insists on turning Syriza from its noble task of reforming the EU and NATO from within whilst charming the EU, IMF and ECB and Fraul Merkel into debt relief and quietly dismantling the European capitalist system when no one is watching.
If you read the KKE central committee analysis of the post election situation you will see a sober analysis of the balance of class forces and a realistic assessment of what is needed to tackle the crisis in the interests of the working class.
Today’s moves by the new government which include extending some democratic rights combined with the elements of a mildly Keynesian economic strategy are of immediate benefit for sections of the people and will serve to raise morale and expectations. They will fuel expectations of future advance which can only result in sharpening conflict both with the political representatives of Greece’s disunited an capitalist class and with the Troika.
In this sense the expectations raised by the Syriza election victory can become a material force that would, inevitablky, produce divisions within both government and party.
The KKE appears to be holding to the Gramscian dictum ‘Optimism of the will, pessimism of the intellect’ with rather more fidelity than Syriza’s leadership in that it insists that real advance is only possible with a mobilised people that can carry through a rupture with the EU and NATO.
After more than 3 decades of neoliberalism, a left social democratic programme should not be judged by purist revolutionary standards but as a welcome & progressive stepping stone that creates (i) some important reformist victories to facilitate & consolidate working class material recovery & (ii) a new political space in which all socialist forces can agitate within a more self-active working class for more fundamental change. In short, I see Syriza’s programme primarily as catalytic rather than the more cataclysimic one some people call for, because the latter is no longer possible from a standing start after 30 years of neoliberalism. We need to update leftist strategy in line with how capitalism has developed since the late 1970s.
You never cease to amaze me with your faulty convoluted logic John Tummon . In fact by your own argument the KKE doesn’t even have the excuses the German KPD did have in 1928 for adopting the “Social Democrats are Social Fascists – no different from the Nazis” strategy (which ensured both Communists and Socia lDemocrats went into the concentration camps together in 1933) . There is of course no valid political reason , other than the KKE’s Stalinist vanguardism for its hostility and refusal to ally with Syriza. So you think that the disastrously ultraleft and sectarian “Third Period” tactic of the German Communist Party – at the behest of Moscow – from 1928 – until the Nazis came to power and locked up and murdered Social Democrats and Communists alike was CORRECT , John Tummon ? You must be the only person left on the planet (outside of the KKE and a few Maoist groups) who thinks that today !
All you apologists for todays sectarian abstentionist posturing by the KKE, in which they constantly denounce Syriza in the most ultraleft terms, gleefully awaiting it to fail as a radical Left government, will fail to fool the working class in Greece or Europe at the gross failure of a supposed part of the socialist Left to offer any support to the most radical government in Europe since WW2. The KKE’s small group of MP’s could have provided Syriza with an entirely socialist government – rather than immensely weakening the struggle by it having to ally with the rightist Independent Greeks.
John Penney, your jargon-drenched 67-word penultimate sentence is impenetrable, but, look, we agree about the KKE posture towards Syriza, but not about KPD policy in the Weimar Republic. You see them as puppets of Moscow, even though the farcical attempt to take power in 1923 showed that the KPD’s Radek had at least as much influence on the Comintern as vice-versa. The plain fact is that the KPD’s analysis of the SPD was correct; not only had they crushed the 1919 workers rising and murdered the KPD leaders, but Stresemann had, after the hyperinflation, tried to comply with Versailles and revive German capitalism by negotiating US bank loans. From any left perspective, this recent history placed the SPD more or less where New Labour has stood since the 1980s, so you need to show what exactly was wrong with the KPD analysis before you can fault my logic! As for Syriza, let’s just get behind them – their alliance with EDEL is purely tactical.
I suggest anyone from the British Left who wants to advise Syriza about how to conduct their government should read Don Milligan’s excellent piece: http://www.donmilligan.net/OTC_Column.html. A bit of humble pie would do us a lot of good!
“KKE doesn’t even have the excuses the German KPD did have in 1928 for adopting the “Social Democrats are Social Fascists – no different from the Nazis” strategy”
KKE has never adopted such a ‘strategy’, it has never called SYRIZA a Social Fascist party nor treated them as such. KKE quite rightly thinks that SYRIZA is a Social Democratic party -no more or less ‘radical’ than most Social Democratic parties today.
“There is of course no valid political reason , other than the KKE’s Stalinist vanguardism for its hostility and refusal to ally with Syriza”
Is it KKE’s fault that SYRIZA has repeatedly joined PASOK and New Democracy in supporting wage cuts or taking a legalistic approach to workers’ demands in trade unions?
Is it KKE’s fault that SYRIZA joined a PASOK-ND-Golden Dawn coalition in the local elections of Ikaria AGAINST KKE and supported racist or conservative candidates in other constituencies (e.g. Karypidis in Kastoria)?
Is it KKE’s fault that Theodora Tzakri, a former PASOK minister, and Golden Dawn-backing Rachel Makri (former ANEL MP) moved to SYRIZA and became SYRIZA MPs before the elections? It should be noted that ANEL have refused to indict Golden Dawn members in the Greek Parliament.
Besides, a SYRIZA-KKE coalition would never come into power anyway- a large part of conservative former PASOK and ND voters (the so-called ‘nikokirei’ -‘family-men and women’) would never have voted for a KKE-backed government. KKE itself would not have been able to gain 5.5 per cent of the vote if they had decided to ally with SYRIZA. And this is of course known to SYRIZA. The only reason they called for a KKE support before the elections was to attract as many KKE voters as they could.
Finally, as far as sectarianism is concerned, the core of SYRIZA’s current members are those who left the Communist Party back in 1991 to form their own little ‘sect’ of ‘open-minded’, pro-(‘neoliberalist’)EU leftists. And now, oddly enough, ‘anti-stalinist’, ‘open-minded’, ‘forward-thinking’ SYRIZA has no qualms about allying with a racist, anti-immigrant, nationalist party, all for the sake of suffering Greeks of course. I think it would be much better for the Greek workers if SYRIZA and SYRIZA supporters decided to assume responsibility for their own actions and stop blaming KKE for everything.
We certainly should not “blame the KKE for everything” but we are where we are. Syriza is the largest party by miles and has introduced quite quickly a number of measures of benefit to the workers that I’m sure the KKE would support – halting privatisations, raising minimum wage, re-employing cleaners and public sector workers sacked.
The KKE did not have to join a government of Syriza but it could have offered it “conditional support” ie not supported a no confidence vote. This would have pressured Syriza to form a minority government rather than entering a coalition with ANEL.
I’ve submitted an article on this which hopefully will be up soon so comrades can comment on.
UNITED WE STAND DIVIDED WE FALL !
Dearie me John Tummon, why do you constantly refer to the German KPD strategy, and the SPD’s dire actions, in the early 20’s ? This is a complete non sequitur in relation to the “Third Period” politics of today’s KKE. . Straw man arguments seem to be your forte.
The appropriate historical analogy for the quite extraordinary sectarian politics of today’s Greek Communist Party , as I have stated many times, and Stuart King refers to as well, is specifically the ultra sectarian 1928 to 1935 Moscow directed “Commintern enforced “Third Period” worldwide Communist Parties strategy. This strategy was based on a (wrong) analysis that world socialist revolution was imminent – and all the social democratic parties were irredeemably on the side of Capital. Therefore for the KPD in Germany the Social Democrats were simply “Social Fascists” – no different from the Nazis , and no alliances were possible – even tactical ones – even when faced with the ever growing street violence of the Nazi Party and its Brownshirt militias. The whole Third period strategy was of course merely a means to increase the emerging Soviet Stalinist bureaucracy’s power and hold over foreign communist parties and smother resistance to the ever more oppressive rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy as a distinct social strata or class.
By 1935 the Stalinist bureaucracy had done a total policy summersault and were into the “Popular Front” strategy – and fully into bed with social democracy and supposedly “progressive” liberal democracies generally – and sabotaging the socialist revolution in Spain to demonstrate their “good faith ” to their new bourgeois allies. As with today’s KKE, the tactics of the stalinist bureaucracy had everything to do with their own perpetuation and empowerment – and nothing to do with the drive for workers power.
The outcome of this split in the forces of the Left, was, as Stuart King says, that Communists and Social Democrats ended up in the concentration camps together in 1933. It is the 1929 to 1935 disastrous sectarian policy of the “Third Period” that the KKE are today trapped in – a bizarre combination of overall Stalinists politics with ultraleft tactics . But this time without the excuse of these tactics being forced on them by Moscow.
The KKE does seriously believe that it will reap the political benefits of a failure of the Syriza government. It therefore actively desires this government to fail – and won’t lift a finger to support it. Read their English language website for ample proof of this approach – over all the recent years of Syriza’s existence. They have learnt nothing from the sad history of Germany 1928 to 1933. The menace of the Greek generals and their fascist creatures , Golden Dawn, stand in the wings to provide the actual future beneficiaries of a failure of the most Left wing government since WW2.