21.11.2013

Syriza: Looking to its right

Syriza has been held up as a party that should be emulated. Daniel Harvey examines the reality

Since the general election last year, Syriza, a coalition of left organisations, has been the main opposition in the Greek parliament. This achievement seems likely to be followed up by Die Linke in the German Bundestag, where it is widely expected that the main conservative and social democrat parties will unite together to form a grand coalition, as has taken place in Greece. The result in Greece was not exactly surprising, as Syriza has risen in tandem with the devastating austerity programme that has been imposed over the last two years.

The success of an anti-austerity party in a European country has fired up enthusiasm about the potential here of forming a broad party which stands to the left of mainstream social democracy, whilst eschewing ‘sectarian’ Marxist programmatic principles. This perspective has driven many in Left Unity to supporting the Left Party Platform in Left Unity. The hope is that LU, due to be formally constituted on November 30, will be able to achieve similar success.

However, Syriza is today facing a number of challenges, and the political basis upon which it stood for election in 2012 is under constant pressure. It faces calls from the outside to transform itself into a trustworthy party of government. A popular refrain in the Greek media is to urge leader Alexis Tsipras to “cut off some heads”, by which is meant Syriza’s left opposition, who are the most vocal in advocating that Syriza renounce the Greek debt entirely. Meanwhile, a senior figure in the ex-left Pasok party achieved a great deal of publicity when he cheekily urged Greeks to leave the country by the nearest exit if Syriza were ever to gain power.

Congress

On July 10-15 of this year, Syriza held its first congress, during which the leadership proposed a number of changes to the internal regime in order to formally transform it into a party.

In his opening speech, however, Tsipras mostly talked over the heads of the 3,500 delegates (each representing 10 members). He pointed entirely to the obvious failings of the Samaras government and its austerity agenda, whilst saying nothing to justify the internal reforms. They seem to be based on the desire to make the party function like a traditional bureaucratic party, with a strong central executive acting independently of the membership. To ram this through, the leadership reduced the time for debate to a minimum, announcing the congress in May and replacing much of the discussion with the sort of general speechifying you would expect at a Labour Party conference.

The transition from coalition to party was sparked by Syriza’s desire to qualify for the undemocratic 50- seat top-up awarded to the party with the largest share of the vote. Having made cosmetic changes before the last election to conform to the letter of the law, the Tsipras leadership has been pressurising its constituent groups to dissolve themselves. Most did this immediately prior to the congress, including the largest, Synaspismos, which boasts 10,000 members. Opposition, however, came from veteran socialist, Manolis Glezos, who heads the left and is renowned for his role in resisting the German occupation during World War II.

For Glezos, the threat was turning Syriza into a “party of applauders” - not an unreasonable conclusion, given the reforms. The most important of these, other than dissolving all the constituent groups, was, firstly, that the party chair would no longer be appointed by, and accountable to, the central committee, but elected by conference. Secondly, the system by which candidates from different platforms are listed on the same ballot paper for internal elections would be abolished.

The latter measure was clearly intended to be an attack on the proportional representation of opposition groups on Syriza’s leading bodies. And for those groups it would mean, in the words of one delegate, that they would appear in future as “alien outsiders” separate from the majority candidates on the main list. As it turned out, despite this measure being passed, the internal groupings less hostile to the leadership refused to be amalgamated into the main list, meaning that a total of six different lists appeared, completely nullifying the point of initiating the measure in the first place. The left opposition managed to actually increase its representation on the central committee, by gaining 5% on its previous 25% showing at the December 2012 conference.

This put the leadership on the defensive. After trying to bounce its reforms through, it was forced to make concessions, postponing the proposed dissolution of the remaining ‘parties within a party’ for a few months, and proposing that congress would have to decide each time whether to appoint the leader directly or leave it to the central committee. Tsipras justified himself being chosen on the former basis because a stronger and more presidential executive was necessary to steer the party through a difficult period.

However, the left was unable to win its four other motions aimed at nailing down the political basis for the party. At the moment the language used is very broad, and can be interpreted by both the left and right in whichever way they like. Generally though, Tsipras has been quite careful in his use of terms, tending not to talk about, say, debt cancellation outright, but more blandly about “negotiations” with “European partners”. He is attempting to tread a very thin line between rejecting austerity and, under the cover of internationalism, calling on Greece to come to a deal to stay in the euro zone and European Union. The motions pushed for by the left would have forced the party to reject the debt entirely, but instead take the national socialist route of preparing for life outside the EU through the nationalisation of the banks under popular control, to be implemented by a new left-only coalition against austerity.

Patriotic alliance

Despite Tsipras’s manoeuvring, the possibility of a Syriza government remains very remote. In order to win a majority for itself it would need, aided by the 50-seat top-up, something like 40% of the popular vote, but it is in fact slipping back behind its 2012 showing of 26%, as a section of the population has become disillusioned with Syriza’s reformist noises. A popular, but quite polarised, discussion centres on the comparison between Syriza and the early Pasok - the latter described by some young Greeks as the “Syriza of our parents”, which emerged as a radical formation after the end of military rule in 1974. Pasok’s leader, George Papandreou, insisted on calling himself a socialist, despite being offered the leadership of the liberal coalition leading out of the dictatorship.

On November 11, Syriza MPs moved a no-confidence motion against the government. The right- Eurocommunist faction, Democratic Left, which left Syriza in 2010, had formed a coalition with Pasok and New Democracy in 2012, but subsequently left it in June of this year in a row over the closure of the national broadcaster, ERT. The government won the confidence vote with a majority of just three. Ranged against it was Syriza on the one side and the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn on the other. The government is hanging by a thread, but the composition of the opposition makes the formation of a viable alternative administration unlikely, to say the least.

To form a government Syriza would either have to join with elements in Pasok that are widely seen as responsible for the economic mess the country is in, or form an alliance with the nationalist conservative Independent Greeks (ANEL). The former would mean a humiliating cave-in to Angela Merkel, while the latter would leading to ‘drachmageddon’ - the abandoning of the euro which some studies have shown could mean a paper loss of up to half in the value of the country’s wealth practically overnight. The Communist Party of Greece (KKE) shows no sign of reversing its opposition to any coalition with the “opportunist” Syriza any time soon.

Incredible though it may seem, some commentators are seriously considering the possibility of a Syriza-ANEL coalition - the equivalent of Left Unity, in the very unlikely event it was to grow as large as Syriza, entering into an anti-EU coalition with the UK Independence Party in order to keep out a coalition of the Tories and Labour. For the left opposition inside Syriza that would obviously be a non-starter - although some might say it would be in line with the logic of its proposal for a separatist route outside the euro fold. But intellectual pressure on Syriza to look for a solution like this is nothing new - Costas Lapavitsas has been a prominent proponent, for example.

Even more prominent is Slavoj Žižek, who has shared numerous platforms with Alexis Tsipras - most recently at the sixth Subversive Festival in Zagreb, Croatia in May this year. Here Žižek pulled no Stalinist punches whatsoever in demanding that Tsipras look for an alliance with the “patriotic bourgeoisie”, so that he can show to the world that the radical left can “manage capitalism” even more effectively than the capitalist class left to itself. This he counterposed to the outdated programmes of the “utopian left”, which will never see the light of day.

Meanwhile, Tsipras has his left opposition to worry about. The leadership was largely unsuccessful in pacifying it this year and a far more aggressive bureaucratic approach would be needed to silence it. But that could provoke a further split, just as Syriza was trying to form a government.