Anatomy of a Crisis

Syriza has suffered another split and is now a much smaller party. Stefanos Kasselakis, the successor to Alexis Tsipras as president of Syriza, was not only ousted from his position by a newly formed majority at the Central Committee, but also barred from taking part in the leadership election. After mobilizing his supporters to impose his candidacy on the party, including by organizing a mass protest outside of the venue where the party Congress took place between November 8 and 10, Kasselakis left the party along with some members of parliament and has gone on to found his own party, called Movement of Democracy, which has five members of parliament.

As a result of MPs following Kasselakis or simply leaving Syriza, Pasok has now replaced Syriza as the main party of opposition in the Greek Parliament. At the same time, the party is plummeting in the polls. Syriza — which in the meantime elected a new leader, Sokratis Famellos — is currently polling at around 6-7 percent. To make things even more complex, it seemed that within the current “base” of Syriza, significantly reduced because of the party crisis, there was a current in favor of Kasselakis, a man with no background within the Left who was, despite his populist rhetoric, unsuccessful in increasing the popularity of Syriza.

This crisis marks the political end of the road for Syriza. They have lost almost all their political capital and become a much smaller party, tormented by internal strife. Already Pasok, the socialist party, is faring much better than Syriza at the polls, having secured second place, albeit at a significant distance from the ruling New Democracy party.

How has a party that almost a decade ago won an election come so close to political irrelevance? Looking at the trajectory of Syriza can explain how this outcome became possible. Syriza was catapulted to a central position on the Greek political scene not because it had a broad base within Greek society — it was a relatively small party — but because of the acute social and political crisis which arose in 2012. The “memoranda” imposed by the infamous “troika,” made up of the European Union, the International Monetary Fund, and the European Central Bank — the three parties responsible for managing bailouts to Greece as well as Cyprus, Ireland, and Portugal — led to harsh austerity measures that caused an economic and social crisis within Greece.

It was at this moment, when political and electoral relations of representation were collapsing at an accelerated pace, that Syriza managed to fill the void by suggesting that the only alternative to the economic violence dictated by the troika was to form a “government of the Left.”

This moment came in 2015 when Syriza won the election. However, despite obtaining significant electoral support, Syriza remained a party with a large electoral following but little organizational presence. It never enjoyed the linkages to the working class, the lower middle class, the trade union movements, and local government that Pasok had. For most of its electorate, Syriza represented a vote, not an “organic” social and political coalition. Moreover, Syriza never really elaborated a strategy for confronting the EU. In particular, the persistent attachment to the “European road” meant that it never had any plan for an exit from the Eurozone. This had to do with the fact that, despite the party’s often radical rhetoric, its dominant political line was a reformist one with strong elements of “left Europeanism.”

Consequently, when the EU used the Eurozone to pressure the Greek government, Syriza, unwilling to entertain a break with Europe, could only capitulate, even after getting majority support to reject the memorandum in a 2015 referendum.

Syriza did, however, manage to win its second election in 2015, despite its capitulation and the fact that the left wing of the party exited and formed a new party named Popular Unity. However, the fact that Syriza treated the “no” vote of the referendum as a “yes” and negotiated a third memorandum only led to a deeper trauma within the social classes and groups that helped Syriza reach power. For many, Syriza’s actions undermined faith that the party — and Tsipras personally — was capable of standing firmly behind its political promises and commitments.

In power, Syriza implemented a fully neoliberal program of austerity and privatization. In certain aspects it proved to be more successful than its predecessors in making sure that the demands of the troika were duly satisfied. While Syriza did try to maintain the appearance of caring for the poorest sections of society, its program did nothing to alleviate poverty or strengthen the hand of the working class. This created a strong sense of disillusionment and disappointment among the Greek electorate. Syriza would lose the 2019 election and bring New Democracy back to power.

The period from 2019 to 2023 was marked by the inability of Syriza to mount a serious opposition to New Democracy, despite the many problems with the latter’s policies, including the fact that Greece had one of the worst mortality rates during the pandemic. Syriza’s strategy during that period was what could be described as a “ripe fruit” strategy, according to which the discontent with the government policy would lead, by itself, to Syriza’s return to power.

During this period, Syriza made no real assessment or self-critique of its period in government between 2015 and 2019, and did not stop to ask what political program and strategy could point to an alternative. The New Democracy government took advantage of state spending during the pandemic to solidify its social base and thus ended up with a very clear victory in the 2023 election and remained in power. Syriza, meanwhile, lost a significant proportion of its vote. In 2023, it won just 17.83 percent of the vote, down from 31.53 percent in 2019. The year since has been characterized by political and organizational crisis.

It was in the midst of this crisis that Tsipras, the party’s undisputed leader up to that point, decided to resign and call for new leadership elections, which is when Kasselakis entered the race. He came from the business world, had a background in shipping in the United States, and had no relation to the Left. In fact, at some point, he was a registered as a Republican.

Kasselakis had no real program and promoted himself entirely through social media. But he was also young, photogenic, and used populist rhetoric freely. By the time of the leadership election, Syriza’s base, which had lost any real sense of political orientation, was more willing to elect a complete unknown like Kasselakis.

After Kasselakis’s victory in the leadership election, an important segment of Syriza opted to leave, forming New Left, a party which, despite the impressive number of ex-ministers within its ranks, struggles to pass at opinion polls the 3 percent threshold for parliamentary representation (and failed to elect a European member of parliament in the 2024 European elections). Tsipras remained mostly silent on the internal situation. Instead of engaging in Syriza politics, the former leader went on to found his own political foundation and make public interventions on general political questions without being involved in party politics. This has led observers to speculate on whether he is contemplating a comeback.

In power, Kasselakis preferred simplistic populist rhetoric over substance. As a manager of the party, he promoted people friendly to him to positions of power within the party apparatus. He has also undermined the party’s media by not taking measures to secure their financing. This has led to almost continuous strike action from Syriza media employees, many of whom fear for their job security. At the European elections in May 2024, Syriza fared poorly and won just 14.92 percent of the vote, an outcome that led members to complain about Kasselakis’s leadership and his lack of strategy or political substance.

In response to Kasselakis’s shortcomings, a majority opposed to his leadership formed inside the Central Committee. It not only ousted Kasselakis as party president but also forbade him from participating in the leadership election. He reacted to this by threatening Syriza with legal action, causing a crisis that reached a high point at the party congress.

After the split with Kasselakis, Syriza proceeded with the process of electing a new leader. The race was mainly between Famellos, who was for some time the leader of the parliamentary group under Kasselakis (before being replace by Nikos Pappas) and Pavlos Polakis, an MP popular with segments of the party base for his hard-nosed rhetoric. In the end, Famellos was elected, gaining almost 50 percent, with Polakis conceding in the name of unity. Currently, Syriza attempts to present an image of unity but it is a much smaller party.

The sources of this crisis lie, I think, in the events of the summer of 2015, which culminated in the referendum on the troika’s memoranda and the subsequent acceptance of the terms of the troika. In the aftermath of these events, an irreparable rupture emerged between Syriza and important segments of Greek society, a rupture that was never dealt with because of the absence of any serious self-critique and explanation, as well as any strategic vision other than a repetition of some variety of contemporary “center-left” politics. Syriza never actually elaborated a radical strategy or position and never went beyond the limits of a post-Eurocommunist reformism — an outlook that left it incapable of conceiving of a serious alternative to New Democracy.

The party’s refusal to entertain any break with Europe meant that, even while Greece was suffering at the hands of the Eurozone, Tsipras was incapable of advancing a critique of the cause of the crisis. The experience of governance and the decision to turn more toward a social democratic, “center-left” positioning only made things worse, while the inability to have real grounding in movements and local government meant that Syriza’s relationship with the working class and other subaltern social strata never developed. In fact, it became even more fragile, culminating in these social groups eventually abandoning Syriza. Syriza’s decline has also shifted the political balance of forces to the right. Three far-right parties passed the 3 percent threshold during last year’s European elections and sent their representatives to the European Parliament.

There are a lot of lessons to be learned from this experience. Simply saying that the entire sequence of events was from the beginning determined to end in defeat is to massively underestimate the political potential unleashed in the first half of the 2010s in Greece. The Eurozone crisis, and the mass opposition to the troika, genuinely did point toward a path for the Left to win power and use it in the interests of the popular classes. But absent a strategy to either confront or break with the Eurozone, supported by movement mobilization, there was no left path for Greece that would not have culminated in spectacular failures and political tragedies.