Greece: The missed opportunity and the defeat of 2015

Founded in 2004, SYRIZA (Coalition of the Radical Left), was elected to lead Greece’s government in 2015—unprecedented for the radical left in Europe. SYRIZA had built itself as an opposition party that firmly opposed imperialism, racism, xenophobia, and neoliberal capitalism. But within months after his election as prime minister, SYRIZA leader Alexis Tsipras turned his back on these long-standing radical principles—leading to the party’s rapid decline in the years that followed. Below, Antonis Davanellos, a leading member of the Workers’ Left (DEA) in Greece, analyzes Tsipras’s betrayal and the consequences for the far left.

The hilarious tragedy of the events that followed the election of Stefanos Kasselakis [a shipping investor and former banker, who was at some point a registered Republican in the U.S.] as SYRIZA’s leader, proves once again that in life, and even more so in political life, no “major account” remains unpaid. In the case of SYRIZA, the “account” was particularly large and important. It concerned the historic moment of “2015”, when Alexis Tsipras sold out a historic opportunity for workers to reverse the neoliberal attack of capital in the brutal form that it took in Greece after the outbreak of the international crisis of 2008, with the policies dictated by the so-called Memorandums between Greek governments and the “troika” (the European Union, the International Monetary Fund, and the European Central Bank,).

The history

In the years that followed, we heard or read dozens of times the claim that Alexis Tsipras was the “leading figure” who took by the hand a small party that used to win 3-4 percent of the vote and led it to governmental power. This claim bears no relation to reality and has little credibility with anyone who has a genuine experience of the realities in SYRIZA in the pre-2015 period.

SYRIZA was founded and gradually strengthened politically through its association with the international movement against the neoliberal capitalist globalization, war and racism. It developed as a hybrid form of a “party”, more like a united front in the political field, which tried to express systematically and in an organized way the tens of thousands of people who supported the successful actions of the Greek Social Forum in the daily political struggle of the time. The choice was not unanimous: the supporters of a convergence with social democracy and the center-left, the lovers of an absolutely electoral strategy, the enthusiasts of successive ‘enlargements’ towards the political center, who were not a fringe current in the party of Synaspismos at the time, considered the formation of SYRIZA a “disastrous ultra-left mistake” and fought tooth and nail to break it up. The founding of SYRIZA, its stabilization and the concentration of political power that was gradually achieved during the years of Alekos Alavanos’ leadership, were predicated on a left turn and the rejection of the spill-over into social democracy. This reminder is of particular political importance today, because the regime and the ideological and political mechanisms at its service are trying to impose as common sense the view that only right-wing policies have prospects, that only conservatism yields political power.

The internal dynamics in SYRIZA during that upward and radical period showed that a substantial change in the political terrain was possible, aiming at the creation of a broad oppositional force of the radical Left. When, after December 2008, Alekos Alavanos first opened the debate on the slogan “government of the Left”, he was met with dismissive skepticism from many quarters (including Alexis Tsipras’ subsequent key ‘advisers’). As far as we were concerned, we had stated that we were not interested in a turn towards a left-wing electoral “populism”, modelled on Lula’s PT in Brazil, since this was the only “route” to claiming governmental power in the specific circumstances of the time.

All this changed dramatically with the crisis. The international crisis of 2008 shook Greek capitalism to its core, invalidating all the recipes that had been tried for its growth until then. The decision of then prime minister Giorgos Papandreou to accept the draconian austerity package dictated by the creditors and to declare from the small island of Kastelorizo the First Memorandum, led to the overwhelming entry of the working and popular masses into the political realm, with the aim of repelling the reactionary choice made by the local ruling class in agreement with the EU, the ECB and the IMF. The successive mass general strikes, the massive rallies in all the cities of the country, the occupation of public squares, the resilient resistance against the brutality of the mechanisms of state repression etc. showed the determination of the people to “break the wall” of the memorandum agreement between the local capitalists and the Troika. In this long period of upward struggles, the people combined the methods of the “streets” (with the long sieges of the Parliament by hundreds of thousands of determined demonstrators) with the methods of the “ballot” (shrinking with unprecedented speed the electoral influence of New Democracy and PASOK and turning their hopes and aspirations mainly towards the Left).

The qualitative rise of the resistance movement in Greece also had a crucial international dimension. The struggles here became a point of reference initially in the countries of the so-called PIGS club (Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Spain) but also in the rest of Europe. Schaeuble and Merkel proved to be more sharply astute than the local political leaders (including SYRIZA’s) when they proclaimed the repulsion of a “contagion” (of the Greek “virus” of resistance) as a key pillar of their policymaking in those crucial years. The European leaders understood that if the movement and the Left in Greece succeeded in breaking the Memorandum offensive, then this “break” would not remain isolated to a small EU member state, but it would directly threaten the socio-political balance throughout Europe.

Whoever underestimates the power of the mass movement of the “anti-Memorandum” period is doomed to never understand anything of the explosive political developments of the time. But it is also necessary to clarify another “limit” of that hot period. Despite the qualitative rise of the movement, it did not reach the point of creating conditions for an immediate revolutionary crisis. In Greece in 2010-15, no forms of independent working-class organization emerged that could sustain a revolutionary response to the question of power. No forms of “workers councils” have emerged, neither comparable to the classical historical period of the revolutionary movement (soviets), nor even comparable to the “embryonic” forms that developed, for example, in Chile in 1970-73 or Portugal in 1974-75.

The situation during the hot biennium of 2010-12 looked as if it had been taken straight out of the textbooks and debates of the 4th Congress of the Comintern: an acute social crisis, an ongoing acute political crisis, the inability of the established political forces to support a “commonly accepted” governmental stability, and the strong upward trend of the workers’ and social struggles, which had not (or had not yet…) reached the level of supporting a solution of revolutionary socialist change. Τhe Comintern during the times of Lenin bequeathed to us, in response to similar conditions, the politics centered on the United Front, transitional politics and the struggle for a government of the Left.

It is an open secret that on the crucial questions around this orientation there has been a sharp political dispute and conflict within Syriza from the outset. In 2010, with the Solidarity and Revolt Front, led by Alekos Alavanos, the left wing of SYRIZA had openly and publicly separated from the leading majority around Alexis Tsipras. In 2013, at the first SYRIZA congress, the oppositional Left Platform had the support of more than 30 percent of the delegates.

Those who like to understand history based on the “final result” should remember that the political questions that SYRIZA ultimately tried to address, were not posed by the people firstly to SYRIZA or only to SYRIZA.

The first candidate to address the question of the political expression of the broad agitational current of the time was, naturally, the Communist Party. In the regional elections of November 2010, the Communist Party had garnered 14.44 percent of the vote in Attica, way ahead of SYRIZA, which in addition was facing an open leadership crisis at the time.

In the national elections of May 2012, when the political earthquake was beginning, the CP won 540,000 votes and 8.48 percent, its highest percentage since the crisis provoked by the events of 1989. But the Communist Party clearly underestimated the importance of the struggles against the Memorandum, it refused to assume the tasks that corresponded to its political weight, it refused to elaborate a political direction that would respond concretely to the people’s demand for the overthrow of the governments that implemented the Memorandum. In the subsequent elections on June 12, a month later, it fell to 272,000 votes and 4.5 percent, losing half its electoral influence. In the referendum of 2015, 6 out of 10 CP voters voted NO, rejecting the party’s call for a null vote. Against this background, when the crisis and the defeat of the Tsipras government manifested itself openly in the elections of 2019, the Communist Party was still reduced to winning 299,000 votes and 5.3 percent, falling far short of the political strength it had at the beginning of a period of great struggles and unprecedented crisis. This is mainly a political and not just an electoral failure.

Similar conclusions apply to ANTARSYA, though of course on a different scale of responsibilities. In the climate of a generalized shift to the left, in May of 2012, ANTARSYA recorded an all-time high in electoral influence with 75,428 votes and 1.19 percent. But it could not withstand the political pressure. In June it shrunk to 20,000 votes and 0.3 percent, losing in one month two thirds of a minoritarian and—by definition—“politically hardened” electorate, which it never won back. At the moment of Tsipras’ defeat, in 2019, ANTARSYA was reduced to a mere “registration” rate of 23,000 votes and 0.41 percent.

Election figures can tell only one part of the truth. The refusal of the CP to enter into any serious process for any alternative to the Samaras-Venizelos government was one of the main pretexts of the leading group around Tsipras to justify its opportunistic opening towards ANEL [Independent Greeks, a split from New Democracy that disagreed with the Memorandum on a nationalist basis], and, at the same time, it created one of the main weaknesses of the left wing within SYRIZA regarding the debate around potential political alliances.

In 2010, ANTARSYA had summarily rejected the proposal of the Solidarity and Revolt Front (which included a large part of the Left Current of Synaspismos, the Internationalist Workers Left -DEA, the Communist Organization of Greece -KOE, the Movement for Left Unity in Action -KEDA and others) for a new unitary initiative in the political field. We will never know what would have happened if the challenges of the period that followed had been faced by a “synthesis” of the left wing of SYRIZA and the forces of ANTARSYA.

Thus, the battle of 2015 was fought mainly within SYRIZA.

Government of the Left or Government of National Salvation

Before it won electorally, SYRIZA had previously won politically the “right” to express the people’s hopes for the overthrow of draconian austerity, by recognizing as a precondition the overthrow of the Samaras-Venizelos government of austerity, and by promising a “break” with the Troika.

This was made possible on the basis of an ideological and political platform outlined in the decisions of the 1st Congress of SYRIZA and the electoral Program of Thessaloniki. DEA, as well as the large majority of the Left Platform, had not voted in favor of the decisions of the 2013 congress, describing them as inadequate, while we had publicly described the Thessaloniki Program as modest and inadequate. Nevertheless, the Congress-approved ‘platform’ of SYRIZA still provided a sufficient basis for broad unity in action, for the gathering of political power that was becoming threatening to the forces of the regime. A typical display of the panic that was brewing within the “good society” as we approached 2015 was the mass flight of capitals and funds abroad, as well as the frequent statements by Samaras, Meimarakis and other right-wing politicians that openly reminded the public that the bourgeoisie has other means to defend itself, beyond those of the parliamentary arena. In the international arena, it was clear that the EU and the ECB were preparing to deal with the new government in Greece in a “warlike” manner if and when it attempted to follow the policy promised by the “collective” Syriza.

This scenario never materialized. Because contrary to the fairy tales told by “parrots” in the mainstream press, the leading majority around Alexis Tsipras “escaped” from all the commitments, the congress decisions, the Thessaloniki Program etc., abandoning in panic the whole policy on which SYRIZA’s political power and electoral influence was built. The “Government of the Left” project was not tested in practice; it was not even attempted. It was replaced from the outset by the “Government of National Salvation” project, which had as its hidden political limit the pursuit of consensus with the local ruling class, but also with the Troika. This “turn”, which had been in the making since earlier (since 2013 and more obviously since 2014…), was based on the elaborations of an enclosed “party within the party”, the leading majority originating from Synaspismos, which -terrified of the tasks ahead- abandoned all the features of the previous “left turn” in order to return at full speed to the most failed traditions of Eurocommunism. Alexis Tsipras and his company attempted to govern based on the policy of… Fotis Kouvelis who, possessing an ideological consistency on the “principles” of (conservative eurocommunist) Leonidas Kyrkos and his strategy of broad national unity, had earlier abandoned SYRIZA and turned to support the Second Memorandum, in alliance with Samaras and Venizelos.

The politics of alliances are an irrefutable criterion for the content of any political perspective. The SYRIZA congress had clearly defined the boundaries of potential allies: “from the Left of the Left, to social democrats who had opposed the Memorandum”. Tsipras formed a coalition government with ANEL and picked as President of the Republic Prokopis Pavlopoulos, the politician of New Democracy who -as Minister of Interior- was “at the helm of the State” during the youth revolt of December 2008. DEA had publicly warned of the importance of these choices, but we were not happy at all to stand alone in this denunciation.

SYRIZA’s program was based on the promise of “unilateral actions” to break with austerity (restoration of 13^th and 14^th month salaries and pensions, reintroduction of Collective Labor Agreements, abolition of a horizontal property tax for lower and middle incomes, drastic reduction of VAT, etc.). The Tsipras government suspended the implementation of these “unilateral actions” until (and if…) a broader consensus on them would emerge with… the creditors! The demand for these commitments to be fulfilled immediately and unilaterally was a strong point of the Left Platform and captured the imagination of a large part of SYRIZA’s rank and file.

SYRIZA’s program did acknowledge the prospect of some “negotiation” with the Troika, but it declared that it would develop on the ground of a cessation of debt repayments, the renationalization of banks, measures to control the “freedoms” of capital flight, and the demand for a public audit of the debt. In the public discourse of Alexis Tsipras, the need for such countermeasures was replaced by “bold” and “carefree” predictions that “Merkel will take it [SYRIZA’s proposal] under broad daylight”. This led to the agreement of 20^th of February, that provided for a commitment to pay all debt instalments “on time and in full”. Beyond the public disagreement of the Left Platform, Manolis Glezos’ harsh denunciations will always remain as a shaming mockery for those who contributed to, or tolerated, this despicable Agreement.

SYRIZA’s program included the formulation “not a single sacrifice in the name of remaining in the Eurozone”. But this was almost immediately replaced by the commitment “to remain at all costs in the Eurozone”, which was not approved by any collective body. Since April-May 2015, we had publicly warned that these choices by the government were paving the way for a Third Memorandum, this time signed and implemented by a government that prides itself on being a “government of the left”.

The last radical convulsion of SYRIZA was the referendum. It is common knowledge that in the face of all kinds of threats, a significant part of the governmental majority, in coordination with Dora Bakoyannis and a part of New Democracy, moved in panic to cancel it. It was mainly the attitude of SYRIZA’s rank-and-file and the position of the Left Platform that prevented such an embarrassing folding. The overwhelming majority of the NO vote was a striking proof of the “objective” potential for the necessary rupture. The failure of the left wing of SYRIZA, in cooperation with the forces of the anti-capitalist left which recognized the importance of the referendum and fought for NO, to defend the result and impose respect for the popular will, was a major, perhaps decisive, defeat. Because respect of SYRIZA’s leading group for the result lasted less than 2-3 days.

The 3rd Memorandum was already here. No one has the right to forget that it was voted in parliament by the “presidential majority” of SYRIZA, together with New Democracy and the social-liberal PASOK. This was, after all, the program of “National Salvation”: the continuation and escalation of the brutal aggression of capital, at the expense of even the most elementary workers’ and social rights. And in this policy the bourgeois parties that supported the past Memorandums converged with SYRIZA of Alexis Tsipras that supported the new one, with the blessing of Schäuble and the Troika.

In the elections of September 2015, the disappointment and withdrawal of hundreds of thousands of people who had voted for the Left and now turned to abstention was decisive. Tsipras, still enjoying the benefit of the doubt about his intentions and policy, regained the prime minister’s position by relying on the crutch of ANEL leader Panos Kamenos. But the policy of his second government was predetermined by the Third Memorandum.

Today, when it is time to take stock, it is literally shameful for any leftist to refer to any “positive aspects” in the policy of the 2015-19 government. In those years, the share of wages and pensions as a percentage of the annual GDP fell to an all-time record low, pointing the finger at the maximization of the rate of exploitation of workers. The rate of “flexible” (part-time, seasonal, precarious) employment has also reached an all-time record, with flexible “contracts” being extended to public hospitals, schools and even the workforce of the Labor Inspectorate itself! The law that was signed by then minister Giorgos Katrougalos institutionalized the sharp reduction of pensions, transforming the Memorandum cuts (imposed as “exceptional” and “temporary”) into a “new way of calculating pensions”, thus incorporating these cuts as legitimate and long-lasting.

But the damage was not limited to the economic sphere. In those years, the “friendly” cooperation with American ambassador Jeffrey Pyatt laid the foundations for an even more profoundly pro-NATO “turn” of the Greek state. The close cooperation with Netanyahu (whom Tsipras affectionately called “Bibi”…) laid the foundations for the deepening of the Greece-Israel “axis”. On the question of Cyprus, in cooperation with Greek Cypriot President Nikos Anastasiades, the most unlikely “flip-flops” were made (like the initiative to begin negotiations and the sudden torpedoing of these negotiations in Crans Montana). The repressive and judicial mechanisms of the state have remained intact and systematically protected.

In 2018, the consensual agreement with the creditors, falsely presented as an “exit from the Memoranda”, summed up this development. By summing up the gains won by capital in these four years, it ‘relaxed’ all the memorandum commitments concerning the “businesspeople”, the big Groups, the capitalist enterprises and the banks. On the contrary, for workers, the memorandum cuts were extended and put under a “mutually beneficial” framework of surveillance until … 2060! Six years after Tsipras boasted that he “took the country out of the Memoranda”, the restoration of the 13th and 14th month wages and pensions, the effect of Collective Labor Agreements, the reduction of the (allegedly extraordinary) Memorandum taxes, etc. still remain as objectives to be claimed and fought by the labor movement and the majority of society.

Unlike what happened in other similar experiences internationally (e.g. Lula’s Brazil), the left wing reacted fast and separated itself by breaking ranks with the government in time. In 2015, after the battle of the referendum was over, the Left Platform and significant members of other “tendencies” left SYRIZA, along with a remarkably large percentage of the party’s pre-2015 membership. Despite the actual political or tactical disagreements that existed or still exist between us, we need to note our respect for these comrades: at a time when the system was rolling out the red carpets of “cooptation” for them, they picked the hard road, honoring their relationship with the struggling masses. The evolution of the Popular Unity, (formed by those who split from SYRIZA and forces that split from ANTARSYA) and its failure to build a visible and effective alternative will be the subject of another article in this tribute.

The consequences

These deeds led SYRIZA and Al. Tsipras to a political and electoral defeat in 2019, in the hands of the outright neoliberal faction that, under Kyriakos Mitsotakis, is leading New Democracy (ND).

The responsibilities are heavy. Economic and social policy, international orientation, but also the state machine, were handed over as “ready-made” to the right-wing in order to accelerate the neoliberal aggression of capital.

As it turns out, those who thought that a certain period in opposition would enable Tsipras to rebuild SYRIZA have understood nothing of what had happened.

A four-year term in government under the Memorandum had caused a profound transformation. SYRIZA may continue to describe itself as ‘radical left’, but in reality, it takes a generosity of spirit to describe it even as a social democratic party in the era of the social-liberal degeneration of international social democracy. During 2019-2023, we witnessed the development of the mores and customs that ultimately led to the Kasselakis fiasco. When Stefanos smugly says that “in a normal party, I could never be a candidate for president” he is telling some truth.

The successive splits and the SYRIZA crisis have created political opportunities for PASOK. The so-called “tactical wizard” Alexis Tsipras, after having been instrumental in revitalizing the right-wing in Greece (which in the summer of 2015, had reached about 17 percent… ), is now facing the possibility of seeing the ‘independent and self-reliant’ reorganization of social democracy around PASOK, the party that the movement against the Memorandum had led to such a disintegrating crisis that required the new international political term “Pasokification” to describe it.

The defeat of 2015 had wider consequences. The disillusionment and disengagement that was prematurely demonstrated by the abstention in the September ’15 elections proved to be a more permanent feature. Between May ’12 and September ’15, more than 900,000 people, mostly from working class and popular districts, withdrew their hopes from the political/electoral game. Between January ’15, when the wave of hope for a left-wing government was peaking and the second round of the 2023 elections, when Al. Tsipras was forced to resign as leader of his party, SYRIZA lost 1,300,000 voters, a loss that far exceeds the 900,000 voters it had held back (temporarily, as the further collapse in the 2024 European elections proved).

With the defeat of 2015, SYRIZA’s U-turn and capitulation closed the great upward cycle of struggles of the anti-Memorandum era and literally paved the way for Mitsotakis. The protagonists of this political tragedy are still looking for political and electoral roles. But they will be, once and for all, as (old Eurocommunist intellectual) Angelos Elefantis used to say (for PASOK at his time): “from the point of view of socialism and the working class, totally indifferent”.