No more cheap slogans

Those who know the “deep” SYRIZA – that is, the core party cadres that were there when the party was polling no more than 3% – certainly appreciated the humor of their leader, Alexis Tsipras, who resigned last week. He pulled a real trick with his decision. We are talking about a generation of people who did politics from the cafes of Exarchia, in downtown Athens, and hung out on the beaches in the summer (all summer).

Now, as Tsipras said on Thursday when he announced his resignation, the priority is “the need to invent the new SYRIZA, which will be able to modestly and with open eyes read the new contrasts and the new trends in society, the new challenges of our time, and respond to the expectations of those it wants and has pledged to represent.” Let’s wish him good luck, but that’s what he had in the years of the economic crisis.

After 2015, the key issue for SYRIZA was to decide what it wanted to become. Now that it has shrunk again, this question is more urgent. For many years, Tsipras was like Janus. He was the prime minister of the disastrous negotiation with Greece’s lenders and the same one who made the infamous “kolotoumpa” (about-face) in July 2015. He implemented reforms, making the Public Revenue Authority independent, but he never advertised them because they were bailout conditions.

After 2015, the key issue for SYRIZA was to decide what it wanted to become. Now that it has shrunk again, this question is more urgent

“New Democracy and SYRIZA voted for the same thing 45.21% of the time in Parliament during the four-year period 2019-2023,” the NGO Vouliwatch wrote on May 11. But all that everyone remembers is SYRIZA’s rhetorical negativity and the toxicity of its officials.

Asked by Kathimerini’s executive editor how he views criticism that the party’s image “was muddled. You had, on the one hand [populist former minister Pavlos] Polakis and, on the other, [moderate technocrat Giorgos] Chouliarakis,” he responded: “Of course, contradictions in our public discourse and our public image remained, but I think all big parties have such contradictions as part of their ‘big tent’ nature. But these contradictions were often blown out of proportion by a media ecosystem that, to put it mildly, was on ‘the other side.’ And I say this not as an excuse, but as a cold-blooded appraisal.”

Now, after SYRIZA’s collapse to just 18% of the vote in the June 25 election, he stated that “we must respond to the popular mandate, to reorganize immediately and without any delay both our confrontation with the government of New Democracy, and the confrontation with our own weaknesses and problems.”

The first, that is, to present a serious opposition to the government, needs a lot of work – not cheap slogans. The second needs even more work…