SYRIZA: The challenge of unity and reinvention

Main opposition SYRIZA is going through a deep crisis, with both its identity as well as its leadership being challenged.

After months of intense infighting and a process that had the elements of a slow, painful self-destruction, on Sunday the party averted at the last moment what looked to be a political explosion, by opting not to hold a new election for president.

Last week, former prime minister Alexis Tsipras, who had led SYRIZA to two election victories, intervened, expressing in a post his deep concern for the party’s continuing slide in the polls, criticizing both his successor Stefanos Kasselakis and the latter’s opponents within SYRIZA for fragmenting the left and benefiting ruling New Democracy, and calling for a special election to renew the mandate of the present head of the party or come up with a new leadership.

After much drama, and as the pundits were wondering how the back and forth among the members, and the public clash between Kasselakis and his potential opponent Olga Gerovasili would impact SYRIZA, the party’s congress decided not to go to leadership elections.

Kasselakis’ leadership position remains uncertain. Will he be strengthened or weakened by the latest developments? There are arguments on both sides. 

In any case, his first order of business is to keep his party united. Having gradually fallen behind socialist PASOK – polling around 12%, a huge drop from the 35% it got in 2015 – SYRIZA comes out of the Congress traumatized, facing an existential challenge and an uncertain future.

At the moment one cannot see a clear, let alone easy, path of re-emergence from what for many critics looks like an abyss.

What almost everyone, supporters and opponents alike, agrees on is that in order to have any hope of returning to power in one form or another, SYRIZA has to change and be reinvented.

To what extent this can happen, and if it does, in what direction the party will move, remains to be seen.