As Greece heads for a general election on Sunday, its citizens surely have plenty of reason for discontent. The country is, after all, still reeling from years of neoliberal policies, whose sheer savagery is without comparison in Western Europe. The effects of austerity were dramatically illustrated at the end of February, when fifty-seven people died in the Tempi train disaster, prompting angry protests. Yet ahead of the election, the political situation seems rather stagnant.

The incumbent ruling party is Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s right-wing New Democracy, which has held power since 2019. While a change in the electoral system leaves it unlikely to achieve an outright majority — with a high possibility of a second election to follow — it has maintained its lead in national polls. The main opposition party, Syriza, seems unable to capitalize on popular discontent, amidst the enduring trauma of its capitulation to austerity in July 2015.

To its left, a new coalition called MeRA25-Alliance for Rupture has formed for this election, seeking to overcome this baleful legacy. It brings together MeRA25, the movement created by former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, which entered parliament in the 2019 elections (on 3.4 percent support), and Popular Unity, formed in 2015 by the currents emerging from the left wing of Syriza and certain sectors of the far left, with the support of social-movement activists and intellectual figures. This coalition aims at rebuilding a united radical-left space, able to learn from past failures and respond to the challenges of the present.