Leftist Party’s Rise Upends Greek Political Order
Eirini Vourloumis
Alexis Tsipras, the leader of the leftist party Syriza, at a rally in Athens before last Sunday’s elections.
By RACHEL DONADIO
Published: May 11, 2012
ATHENS — The collapse of Greece’s dominant parties in Sunday’s elections swept a new political force onto the scene here: the Coalition of the Radical Left, or Syriza, a pro-euro yet anti-austerity party that has Greece’s creditors trembling with its calls for the country to reject its current loan agreement and nationalize the banks.
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Although Syriza’s energetic 37-year-old leader, Alexis Tsipras, failed to form a left-wing governing coalition, his party’s unexpected success — with 16.8 percent of the vote, besting the once-mighty Socialists, who garnered only 13 percent, and placing second after the center-right New Democracy’s 18.8 percent — has upended Greece’s political order.
As political leaders struggle to form a government, Mr. Tsipras has emerged as a rising star in Greek politics. He turned down an offer from the Socialists to join a multiparty coalition, that way making it ever more likely that Greece will be forced into new elections next month. If so, that will be fine with Mr. Tsipras, whose party is now the country’s most popular, with support from 24 percent of the electorate, according to a survey this week by the polling company Marc for the Alpha television channel.
Mr. Tsipras is hoping to follow the success of François Hollande in France and ride a tide of anti-austerity sentiment to convince even more Greeks that Syriza is not simply a protest vote but a responsible alternative to the status quo, a break from four decades of ossified two-party government in a country where the debt crisis has redrawn the political map.
“I could not even imagine some months ago that Tsipras would be the second party and would have a chance to rule,” said Nikos Xydakis, a political analyst. In Mr. Xydakis’s view, after the cold war and the boom years, the debt crisis pushed Greece into a new historical cycle. “We are in the beginning of the great European depression, and Greece is the first link to crack, so politics change and Alexis Tsipras tries to begin another circle. He’s very good at capturing the momentum.”
Yet, with the fate of Greece hanging in the balance, it remains to be seen whether the party’s success in elections that Greeks saw as the triumph of democracy over market forces is evidence of a new “Greek spring,” as one Syriza legislator put it, or a sign that Greece is committing “national suicide,” as a Socialist critic would have it.
Critics say that Syriza is dangerously detached from the reality that Greece must either accept the terms of the loan agreements it signed with its foreign lenders — the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund — or prepare to leave the euro. Mr. Tsipras calls such talk “blackmail” and contends that if Greece is forced to leave the euro, it will be the result of the ill-conceived agreement itself and over-the-top austerity measures that helped batter the economy.
Beyond a rejection of the country’s current loan agreement and the austerity measures that come with it, the party is also calling for a three-year suspension of debt repayment until the economy has recovered and the abolition of immunity for government ministers.
On Thursday, Mr. Tsipras sent letters to European leaders urging an overhaul of the European strategy of austerity and stating that “the common future of the European nations is threatened by these catastrophic choices.”
On the spectrum, Syriza falls between the Greek Communist Party, which never broke with Moscow during the cold war and rejects the euro and the European Union, and the Socialist Party, known as Pasok, which is seen as more of a patronage network than an ideology. Syriza is an umbrella of leftist parties ranging from softer-line communists to Marxists to social democrats. The “radical” in its Greek name translates more accurately as “nontraditional.”
Still, in December 2008, the year Mr. Tsipras assumed party leadership, he was roundly criticized for not having condemned the violent elements that rioted in downtown Athens for days after the police killed a teenager. The party’s nonhierarchical structure means that under the guise of moderates, “far-left groups sometimes control the policy” of the party, said Paschos Mandravelis, a columnist for Kathimerini, a daily newspaper.
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