Watching SYRIZA go down
What the very well-organized anti-SYRIZA system failed to do after years of hard work – i.e. to pull down the ideological veneer of the party that put an end to the left’s exclusion from the seat of power – was accomplished by a Greek American from Miami with no party affiliations and no political background.
The most important thing he accomplished was proving how easy it was to expose SYRIZA’s elite for its incompetence, selfishness and pettiness. Some abandoned the party because Stefanos Kasselakis won the leadership via a procedure that they themselves had established and in which he played no part. They kept their seats in Parliament – and by doing so their salaries and privileges – and they tested their popularity in the European elections, where they were soundly defeated, despite having a great deal more public exposure ahead of the elections compared to other small parties.
Others among SYRIZA’s elite chose to oppose their own party’s leadership by working against it from the fringes, by surmounting the de facto abolition of its executive bodies with a noisy presence in the media and by invoking the totem that has become Alexis Tsipras. The former SYRIZA leader and prime minister, for his part, is focusing all of his efforts on rebranding himself, but steering clear of any self-criticism, at least over the big issues, such as, for example, his decision to get into bed with Panos Kammenos’ populist-nationalist Independent Greeks party.
And everyone sits around watching SYRIZA’s demise play out live on their screens, making scathing comments or shedding crocodile tears – but certainly not doing anything to prevent it.
Kasselakis, in the meantime, drags former ministers through the mud by revealing how much they were getting paid by the party and throws down the gauntlet to his predecessor by dropping hints about illegal subsidies. He talks about forming a government and one with ministers who do not come from Parliament, and of a program with a detailed cost breakdown (as opposed to the previous ones…), while planning for big decisions to be made by the party’s supporters, without seeking the approval of SYRIZA’s executive bodies or even having a conversation with them about such matters. Be he on Spetses or in New York, he can suspend the publication of the leftist daily Avgi and announce new think tanks, taking even those whose job such a task would be by surprise, and even more so the cadres looking for a role.
He shows no hesitation because he knows he is not at risk of a heavy defeat inside the party, such as, for example, the defection of all of the party’s MPs and the resignation of every member of the Central Committee, so he’s left with nothing but the name, the offices and the subsidies. Why? For the very simple reason that most SYRIZA officials have no standing whatsoever outside the party framework, have no activities to talk about in the private sector and no accomplishments on their resumes that are not tied to the activities of the party. What they do have, in spades, is badges of honor linked to lost battles that belong in the past. What’s more, they don’t even have the guts to admit that they won the 2015 elections as an anti-systemic party, not as a leftist one, nor that they were so soundly trounced in 2023 because they did not admit to the causes of the defeat of 2019.
