In 2010, Greece entered a period of extreme austerity measures, but also intense social and political struggle. The tectonic shifts produced by the crisis led, in 2015, to the election of Alexis Tsipras’s Syriza — a hope for Europe’s radical left. Yet despite impressive popular resistance, the “Troika” of European institutions soon brought the Greek government to heel — imposing even harsher policies of austerity, privatization, and neoliberal reforms.

The hopes of a break with neoliberalism were disappointed — and in last July’s general election, Syriza was finally ejected from office. Yet this social and political sequence poses important questions — indeed, not only regarding European integration or Greece’s public debt. For this was also a period marked by political crisis, new forms of protest and social movements, and the rise of neo-fascism — phenomena that are now affecting all Western countries in different ways.

The Greek experience was thus a kind of political laboratory. The themes of this period are examined in depth in the collective volume Crisis, Movement, Strategy: the Greek Experience, published by Brill’s Historical Materialism series. The book’s editor, Panagiotis Sotiris, spoke to Jacobin’s George Souvlis about the political moment that the Greek crisis represented, the lessons learned from it, and the unanswered questions for radical-left strategy in Europe today.