IMF vs Greece

The latest agreement between the Syriza government and the creditors shocked many on the Left who have been following events in Greece. It seems to signal the end of a whole political cycle.

In this interview with Jacobincontributing editor Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis, a leading member of the Left Platform in the party covers the latest sequence, to what extent expectations have been confirmed or disproved, and the next steps for the radical wing of the party.

Kouvelakis uses this opportunity to reflect more broadly on the balance sheet of the Left Platform’s strategy, whether things could have been done differently, and what the prospects are for a more general left recomposition.

What were the causes of the July referendum? Many saw it as something out of the blue, a wildcard that Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras pulled out. But there is some uncertainty about his motivations — some even speculate that he thought he would lose.

I think that the referendum was clearly an attempt to get out of the trap into which the government was falling through the negotiating process.

It was quite obvious, actually, that during the downward spiral of concessions the government and Tsipras realized that whatever they proposed was never going to be enough for the troika. By the last week in June, it was clear that the agreement that was more or less taking shape would not pass the internal test within Syriza and would not pass the test of public opinion.

Messages were sent to the leadership and to Tsipras himself from inside the party, from well beyond the ranks of the Left Platform, that this was not acceptable. In the last days of that week, the change in public opinion was also significant, with people saying that they were just fed up with this process of endless negotiations. It was understood that the troika was just seeking to humiliate the Greek government.

Tsipras, who it has to be said is a kind of a gambler as a politician, thought of the referendum — an idea that was not entirely new and which was floated before by others in the government including Yanis Varoufakis — not as a break with the negotiating process but as a tactical move that could strengthen his negotiating plan.

I can be certain about this, because I was privy to detailed reports about the crucial cabinet meeting on the evening of June 26, when the referendum was announced.

Two things have to be said at this point. The first is that Tsipras and most of the people close to him thought it was going to be a walk in the park. And that was pretty much the case before the closure of the banks. The general sense was that the referendum would be won overwhelmingly, by over 70 percent.

This was quite realistic, without the banks closing down the referendum would have been easily won, but the political significance of No would have been changed, because it would have happened without the confrontational and dramatic atmosphere created by the bank closure and the reaction of the Europeans.

What happened in that cabinet meeting was that a certain number of people — the rightist wing of the government, lead by Deputy Prime Minister Giannis Dragasakis — disagreed with the move. Dragasakis is actually the person who has been monitoring the whole negotiation process on the Greek side. Everyone on the negotiating team with the exception of the new finance minister, Euclid Tsakalotos, are his people and he was the most prominent of those in the cabinet who really wanted to get rid of Varoufakis.

This wing thought that the referendum was a high-risk proposal, and they understood, in a way that Tsipras did not, that this was going to be a very confrontational move that would trigger a harsh reaction from the European side — and they were proved right.

They were also afraid about the dynamic from below that would be released by this initiative. On the other hand, the Left Platform’s leader and minister of energy and productive reconstruction, Panagiotis Lafazanis said that the referendum was the right decision, albeit one that came too late, but he also warned that this amounted to a declaration of war, that the other side would cut off the liquidity and we should expect within days to have the banks closed. Most of those present just laughed at this suggestion.

I think this lack of awareness of what was going to happen is absolutely key to understanding the whole logic of the way the government has been operating so far. They just couldn’t believe that the Europeans would react the way that they actually reacted. In a way, as I have said, the right wing of Syriza was much more lucid about what they were up against.

This explains also what happened during the week of the referendum at that level. Tsipras was put under extreme pressure by Dragasakis and others to withdraw the referendum. He didn’t do that, of course, but he made it clear that his next moves were the ones that the right wing would agree with, and the measure was not a break with the line that had been followed up until that point, but was rather a kind of tactical move from within that framework.

And that was the meaning of the kind of backtrack on the Wednesday before the vote?

Exactly. That Wednesday some people even talked about an internal coup happening, and Athens was brewing with rumors that Tsipras was going to withdraw the referendum. During his speech he confirmed the referendum but also made it clear that the referendum was conceived as a tool for getting a better deal and that this was not the end of the negotiation but just the continuation under supposedly improved conditions. And he remained faithful to that line during that entire week.

One thing that I didn’t understand about the process even from a public relations perspective is that he called a referendum over a series of proposed measures that he then called on people to reject and yet in the run-up to the referendum, he made a move towards the creditors that seemed to be even worse in some aspects than the measures that he was calling on people to reject.

That all gave the impression of complete amateurism and chaos.

I’ve tried to reconstitute the intentions of Tsipras essentially to answer your question about whether he thought he was going to lose the referendum and to try to clarify the meaning the referendum had for him. But what is absolutely clear is that it unleashed forces that went far beyond those intentions. Tsipras and the government were clearly overtaken by the momentum that was created by the referendum.

They tried therefore by all means to put the devil back into the box. The way Tsipras dealt with pressure from Dragasakis — and why that Wednesday was so crucial — was that he accepted their line and sent that infamous letter to the Eurogroup and before that the letter asking for a new loan. This opened up the path for what was to come the week after the referendum.

But, on the other hand, in order to justify the fact that he could not without being totally ridiculed withdraw the referendum, he had to give some rationale for the initiative. He has to talk about fighting the austerity measures included in the Juncker package, about the blackmailing of the troika and the ultimatum he had been subjected to. And, of course, the dynamic that was developing from below at that moment seized that opportunity, took him at his word, and went ahead and to wage the battle against the troika.

This is a prime example of an initiative that was taken from above, as the result of internal contradictions, but ended up liberating forces that went far beyond a leader’s intentions. This is very important, because it also has to be understood that one of the biggest difficulties that Tsipras has to face now after the surrender of yesterday’s agreement is the very dubious political legitimacy of this move after the referendum.

We have to understand that it is acomplete illusion to pretend that the referendum didn’t happen. It did happen, and it’s clear to both international public opinion and Greek society that Tsipras is betraying a popular mandate.

So on the big debate — is Tsipras some sort of Machiavellian super-tactical genius or some type of wild gambler overtaken by events, you’re definitely in the second camp?

Well, I’m definitely in the second camp provided that we clarify the following point: actually Tsipras and the leadership has been following very consistently the same line from the start. They thought that by combining a “realistic” approach in the negotiations and a certain rhetorical firmness, they would get concessions from the Europeans.

They were however increasingly trapped by that line, and when they realized that they were trapped, they had no alternative strategy. They consistently refused any other strategy, and they also made it practically impossible for another approach to be implemented when there was still time for that.

Now, in the interview he gave a couple of days ago to the New Statesman, Varoufakis says that a small team of people around him worked during the week leading to the referendum on an alternative plan including state control of the banks, issuing of IOUs and disconnection of the Greek central bank from the Frankfurt ECB, so on a sort of gradual exit. But that clearly came too late and was rejected by nearly all the rest of the economic team of the cabinet, by which he essentially means Dragasakis. And Tsipras, of course, validated that decision.

So we have to stress the continuity of the line of Tsipras. This is also the reason I think the word “betrayal” is inappropriate if we are to understand what is happening. Of course, objectively we can say that there has been a betrayal of the popular mandate, that people very legitimately feel they have been betrayed.

However, the notion of betrayal usually means that at some moment you make a conscious decision of reneging on your own commitments. What I think actually happened was that Tsipras honestly believed that he could get a positive outcome by putting forward an approach centered on negotiations and displaying good will, and this also why he constantly said he had no alternative plan.

He thought that by appearing as a loyal “European,” deprived of any “hidden agenda,” he would get some kind of reward. On the other side, he showed for some months a capacity to resist to the escalating pressure and made some unpredictable moves such as the referendum or travelling to Moscow.

He thought this was the right mix to approach the issue, and what happens is that when you consistently follow this line you are led to a position in which you are left only with bad choices.

And the roots of that strategy: to what extent is it ideological blindness and to what extent is it pure ignorance? What is confusing to many is that you have a government composed of a large number of intellectuals, people who spent their whole lives studying contemporary capitalist political economy, both in the abstract and the concrete, people who are political activists.

How can one explain what seems to be naïveté about their political opponents? Is it thoroughly rooted ideology or was it just a lack of experience with “high politics”?

I think we have to distinguish two elements within the government. The first is the rightist wing of the government led by two of the main economists, essentially Dragasakis but also Giorgos Stathakis. And then the core leadership, Tsipras and the people around him.

The first group had a consistent line from the outset — there was absolutely no naïveté on their part. They knew very well that the Europeans would never accept a break with the memorandum.

This is why Dragasakis from the outset did everything he could not to change the logic of the overall approach. He clearly sabotaged all the attempts for Syriza to have a proper economic program, even one within the framework that had been approved by the majority of the party. He thought that the only thing you could get was an improved version of the memorandum framework. He wanted his hands completely free to negotiate the deal with the Europeans, without himself appearing too much at the stage, he succeeded in controlling the negotiation team, especially once Varoufakis had been sidelined.

In summer 2013, he gave a very interesting interview that created a lot of buzz at the time. What he was proposing was not even a softer version of Syriza’s program, but in reality a differentprogram that was a slight improvement of the existing agreement that New Democracy signed.

And then you have the other approach, that of Tsipras, which was indeed rooted in the ideology of left-Europeanism. I think the best illustration of that is Euclid Tsakalotos, a person who considers himself a staunch Marxist, someone who comes from the Eurocommunist tradition, we were in the same organization for years. The most typical statement from him which captures both his ideology and the outlook given to the government by the presence of all those academics is what he said in an interview to the French website Mediapart in April.

When asked what had struck him most since he was in government, he replied by saying that he was an academic, his job was to teach economics at a university, so when he went to Brussels he had prepared himself very seriously, he had prepared a whole set of arguments and was expecting exactly elaborated counter-arguments to be presented. But, instead of that, he just had to face people who were endlessly reciting rules and procedures and so on.

Tsakalotos said he was very disappointed by the low level of the discussion. In the interview to the New Statesman, Varoufakis says very similar things about his own experience, although his style is clearly more confrontational than Tsakalotos’s.

From this it is quite clear that these people were expecting the confrontation with the EU to happen along the lines of an academic conference when you go with a nice paper and you expect a kind of nice counter-paper to be presented.

I think this is telling about what the Left is about today. The Left is filled with lots of people who are well-meaning, but who are totally impotent on the field of real politics. But it’s also telling about the kind of mental devastation wrought by the almost religious belief in Europeanism. This meant that, until the very end, those people believed that they could get something from the troika, they thought that between “partners” they would find some sort of compromise, that they shared some core values like respect for the democratic mandate, or the possibility of a rational discussion based on economic arguments.

The whole approach of Varoufakis’s more confrontational stance amounted actually to the same thing, but wrapped in the language of game theory. What he was saying was that we have to play the game until the very, very, very end and then they would retreat, because supposedly the damage that they would endure had they not retreated was too great for them to accept.

But what actually happened was akin to a fight between two people, where one person risks the pain and damage of losing a toe and the other their two legs.

So it is true that there was a lack of elementary realism and that this was directly connected with the major problem that the Left has to face today — namely, our own impotence.

And this Europeanism that you describe in the center faction of the Syriza leadership, what is its ideological nature? Because these are not liberals or even Negrian federalists — these are people who think of themselves in most cases as Marxists? Is there an influence from Habermas or Étienne Balibar?

I think that, in this case, Balibar is probably more relevant than Habermas. Once again, I think we have to take Tsakalotos at his word. He gave an interview to Paul Mason just the day after European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker’s very humiliating counter-proposals were sent.

When Mason asked him about the euro, Tsakalotos said that exit would be an absolute catastrophe and that Europe would relive the 1930s with the return of competition between national currencies and the rise of various nationalisms and fascism.

So for these people the choice is between two things: either being “European” and accepting the existing framework, which somehow objectively represents a step forward compared the old reality of nation-states, or being “anti-European” which is equated with a falling back into nationalism, a reactionary, regressive move.

This is a weak way in which the European Union is legitimated — it might not be ideal but it’s better than anything else on the table.

I think that in this case we can clearly see what the ideology at work here is. Although you don’t positively sign up to the project and you have serious doubts about the neoliberal orientation and top-down structure of European institutions, nevertheless you move within its coordinates and can’t imagine anything better outside of its framework.

This is the meaning of the kind of denunciations of Grexit as a kind of return to the 1930s or Grexit as a kind of apocalypse. This is the symptom of the leadership’s own entrapment in the ideology of left-Europeanism.

It’s easier to imagine the end of capitalism than the end of the European Union or even of the euro?

Exactly, I wrote as much a few years ago.

And yet this kind of softness on the European Union is inconsistent with Nicos Poulantzas’s own view, despite some intellectuals using Poulantzas to defend the leadership position.

Yes, Poulantzas talked about the European integration in the first part of his book on social classes in contemporary capitalism, in which he analyzes the processes of internationalization of capital and he clearly considered the European Economic Community an example of an imperialist form of internationalization of European capital within the framework of what he considered the new postwar structural hegemony of the United States.

Let’s talk about the referendum itself again. The referendum happened in a context of liquidity crisis, banks closing, hysterical media backlash, and other parties pushing for the “yes” vote. But then something happened to trigger a counter-reaction of enormous scale from ordinary Greeks.

Were they driven by national pride, was it mainly a class issue, or did, as Paul Mason and others speculate, memories of the Civil War play a role? What are the key sources of the “no” vote?

Of all the factors that you mentioned, the least relevant is the one that relates to the Civil War. We have to see that No dominated in even very traditional right-wing areas of the country like Laconia, near Sparta, Messinia, or other areas in central Greece where the Right dominates like Evrytania. The “no” vote was a majority in all the counties of Greece.

The class dimension was definitely the most important out of the three you mention, which I’ll go through in order of importance. Even relatively mainstream commentators recognized that this was the most class-divided election in Greek history. In working-class districts you had 70 percent and above for “no,” in upper-class districts you had 70 percent and above for “yes.”

The hysterical backlash of dominant forces and the dramatic concrete situation created by the closure of banks and the cap on cash withdrawals and so on, created within the popular classes a very easy identification that the Yes camp was everything they hated. The fact that the Yes camp mobilized all these hated politicians, pundits, business leaders, and media celebrities for their campaign only helped to inflame this class reaction.

The second thing that is equally impressive is the radicalization of the youth. This is the first moment since the crisis that the youth in its mass actually made a unified statement. Eighty-five percent of those from eighteen to twenty-four voted “no,” which shows that this generation, which has been completely sacrificed by the memorandum, is very aware of the future ahead of it and has a clear attitude with regards to Europe.

The French daily Le Monde had this article asking how come these young people, who had grown up with the euro,Erasmus programs, and European Union are turning against it, and the response from all those interviewed was simple: we have seen what Europe is about, and Europe is about austerity, Europe is about blackmailing democratic governments, Europe is about destroying our future.

This also explains the massive and combative rallies of that week, especially culminating with the Friday, July 3 rallies in Athens and other major cities in Greece.

And the third dimension is certainly that of national pride. This explains why outside the big urban centers, where the class lines are more blurred, in the Greece of the countryside and small cities, even there the “no” vote won a majority. It was a “no” to the troika, it was a “no” to Juncker. It was perceived that even for those who are skeptical of the government and don’t identify with Syriza or Tsipras saw that this was clearly an attempt to humiliate an elected government and maintain the country under the rule of the troika.

You went around several workplaces to campaign for No. Can you talk a little bit about that and what reception you faced?

It was of course a very unique experience. There was a disparity of situations — the atmosphere was tough within the railways, a company that has already been largely dismantled and whose remainder will be privatized, and the workers knew that the Syriza government had already accepted the privatization of the railways. It was included even in the first list of reforms announced by Varoufakis after the February 20 agreement.

But despite the varying contexts, in all these places, the discussion was around two different issues: why has the government done so little so far, why has it been so timid? And also what are you going to do after the No victory?

It was totally clear for these people that No would win, because the Yes campaign was invisible in workplaces and among the working class generally, so there was no doubt about what the result would be. But there was a massive amount of anxiety about what would happen after the victory.

So the questions were: what are your plans? What are you going to do? Why do you still talk about negotiations when for five and a half months we have seen this approach clearly fail?

I was in a very embarrassing situation, because, in my role as a Syriza spokesperson and central committee member, I couldn’t give convincing answers to all this.

No, of course, won massively. Were you surprised by the scale of the victory?

Yes, I was not expecting the No to reach the threshold of 60 percent. It has to be said that among the top Syriza cadres, only Lafazanis had predicted that and very few even among the Left Platform agreed with him. Most expected something like 55 percent.

The first immediate impact of this massive victory of the “no” vote was to increase the disintegration of the opposition parties.

On the very evening of the result, these people were completely defeated — this was by far the hardest defeat of the pro-austerity camp since the start of the crisis. It was much clearer and more profound than the January elections, because they had regrouped and mobilized all their forces but still suffered a devastating defeat. They didn’t win a single county in Greece.

New Democracy leader and former Prime Minister Antonis Samaras resigned almost immediately. And then, only hours later, this entire camp was resuscitated and legitimized by Tsipras himself when he called for the “council of political leaders” under the chair of the president of the republic, an open Yes supporter, who had been appointed by the Syriza majority in parliament in February.

At that meeting you saw an extraordinary thing happen — the head of the victorious camp accepted the conditions of the defeated camp. This, it has to be said, is something that’s unique in political history. I don’t we’ve ever seen this before.

The government was perhaps surprised by the strength of the “no” vote, and the class nature it must have understood as well, but its interpretation was simply that it confirmed the initial plans? There was no registering that something deeper was at work?

I can’t really speak for the way they have interpreted the referendum, because everybody has been absorbed by the so-called negotiations, which are just a joke of course. I think the best expression for those negotiations was reported by theGuardian correspondent in Brussels, Ian Traynor, who wrote that an EU officialcalled them an “exercise in mental waterboarding.”

What is clear, however, is that the government immediately took those initiatives to deactivate the dynamic that was emerging with the referendum. And this is why hours after the announcement of the final resort, this meeting of all the political leaders was called, which fixed somehow an agenda entirely different from that expressed by the “no” vote.

The content of this new agenda was that whatever happens — that was of course already there in moves inspired by Dragasakis made the week before — Greece had to stay in the eurozone. And the most emphatic point of the joint statement signed by all the political leaders — with the exception of the Greek Communist Party (KKE), who refused to sign, and the Nazis, who were not invited to the meeting — was that this referendum was not a mandate for a break but a mandate for a better negotiation. So from that moment onwards the mess had been set.

Is there any evidence that people’s positions on the question of the eurozone were shifting during the time of the referendum?

Of course they were shifting. The argument that was constantly repeated by the media, by the political leaders of the Yes camp, but also by all the European leaders who clearly interfered in the referendum in the most blatant way during that week, was that voting for No was voting against the euro. So it’s completely irrational to say that the people voting for No were not in the very least taking the risk of a possible exit from the euro if that was the condition for saying “no” to further austerity measures.

It’s also worth saying that what was happening during that week was a process of radicalization in public opinion. You could feel and hear that in the streets, workplaces, all kinds of public spaces. Everywhere, people were just talking about the referendum, so it was quite easy to perceive the popular mood.

I’m not suggesting it was homogenous. People made the argument that voting “no” would actually just give the government another card for the negotiations. I’m not saying that this is not true. But we also must understand that the massive character of the “no” vote in the country means that the people, more particularly in the working class, in the youth and in the impoverished middle strata, had the feeling that they had nothing to lose anymore, and they were willing to take risks and to give a battle.

The combative spirit of the Friday rallies was another indication of that. It was quite impressive. Personally, I have seen nothing like that in Greece since the 1970s.

Let’s talk about the July 11 vote in parliament on the proposals sent by the Greek government to the Eurogroup. It became clear at that moment that the government had accepted the perspective of a new austerity plan.

Those proposals were finally approved by 251 MPs out of 300, with the pro-austerity parties massively backing them.

One of the conditions posed by the lenders was that the proposals of the Greek government had to be approved by the parliament, knowing that this did not make sense. It’s not even strictly speaking constitutional, because the parliament can only vote for bills or international / inter-state agreements, they cannot vote on a simple document that is the basis for negotiation and can be changed during the negotiation at any time.

But it was a symbolic move that gave carte blanche to the government to negotiate on a dramatically scaled down basis. The proposals of the government were only a slightly scaled down version of the Juncker plank that was rejected in the referendum. So actually what the government was asking for was approval for its U-turn during that week.

But the picture inside Syriza’s parliamentary group looks more complex. So let’s talk all about the differentiation within Syriza’s ranks and the position that the Left Platform took.

The position of the Left Platform was significantly debated internally, specifically inside the major component of the platform, which is the Left Current led by Panagiotis Lafazanis. The majority opinion was that we should go for a differentiated vote at that stage, which meant some people had to vote “present” in the vote itself — which practically amounts to the same as a “no” vote, though perhaps with a lesser symbolic meaning—

Why is it the same as a “no” vote?

Because it doesn’t change the fact of the requisite majority that a proposal needs in order to pass. In any case you need 151 votes to get it passed.

There is another part of the group who’d vote in favor of those proposals while at the same time issuing a statement, saying two things. First that were in a position of political solidarity with those who rejected it — with those who voted “present” in this case, who don’t accept this agreement — and that they would not vote for an agreement containing austerity measures.

And perhaps the second point is even more important than the first (we’ll come back to that in a moment certainly). The reasoning is that Greek constitutional practice is the following: on every bill the government has to show that it has a majority coming from its own ranks, from the party itself or from the coalition, which is the case here if we take ANEL, the party of the Independent Greeks, into account. And, in fact, actually the government lost control of its own majority.

Although it is not legally binding, it is the case that, in Greek constitutional history, when a government loses control of its majority, the famous dedilomeni as it is called (“declared majority”), it has to go for new elections. This is why immediately the discussion of new elections started. The new elections have already been announced — now it’s just a question of when they are going to happen.

So we can see that this line — with which I personally disagreed, I am among those who favored a homogenous “no” vote or “present” vote — failed because actually with the seven Left Platform MPs who voted present plus some Syriza MPs who also voted present (most significantly Zoe Konstantopoulou, the president of the parliament, and Rachel Makri, a former ANEL MP who is now very close to her) the government had already lost its own majority.

However, there is a bottom line now: all the MPs of the Left Platform will reject the new memorandum in the next vote, this has already been announced. To this I have to add that the two MPs of the Left Platform who are not members of the Left Current but close to the Red Network (and DEA and others), the Trotskyist component of the platform, voted “no,” and they were the only two Syriza MPs to vote “no” to the new agreement.

So what you’re saying is that the Left Platform took this complicated position, at least complicated outside the meeting rooms of the National Assembly, because it had miscalculated how unpopular the Tsipras proposal would be? It had underestimated the degree to which people outside the ranks of the Left Platform would step forward and oppose it?

They imagined that they were kind of the “last of the Mohicans.” They thought if they voted “no,” they would bring the downfall of the government and trigger new elections — whereas in fact there was a broader crisis going on that involved, for example, the leader of the parliament, and they didn’t factor that into their calculations? That they were carried by a sense of legitimism?

I would say it was essentially legitimism, it was to show that their intention was not to somehow overthrow the government, but to express their disagreement with its actions, to issue a warning that it was about to cross the final red line. So it was to express the illegitimacy of Tsipras’s move without, at that stage, opting for a clear-cut break with it.

I have to add that the two most important ministers and figures of the Left Platform, Lafazanis himself and the deputy minister of social affairs, Dimitris Stratoulis voted “no” in order to make it clear. Lafazanis also issued a statement saying that while that was the political position of the Platform, they were not trying to overthrow the government.

But do you think that the newly radicalized layers of the Greek working class who had just won a referendum understood what was going on?

Well they understood that the government had lost control of its own majority. The media did the job for us, focusing on Lafazanis, covering who voted “no,” “present,” and “absent,” etc. I also have to add that among those who were absent were the four MPs of the Maoist current (KOE) and Yanis Varoufakis himself, who supposedly had “family obligations.” So the media had done the work for us, and everyone became aware that there was a split within Syriza’s parliamentary group.

Immediately, the most rightist elements of Syriza demanded that those who had disagreed one way or another resign immediately from their positions, including their parliamentary seats. So it was quite clear that Syriza was fractured, though of course the tactics were unclear.

The most symbolic and crucial vote will happen now. Last week’s vote was a vote on the proposals for the negotiation. The next vote, which will determine the future of Syriza and the country, will be the vote on the agreement signed on Sunday. And I think the information I have so far is that the vote will be absolutely clear, and in the popular memory will be the real parallel with the famous May 2010 and February 2012 votes, when everybody was looking at each individual, each individual MP, to see how they would vote in this occasion.

What do you think of the argument of people like Alex Callinicos, whoyou debated a few days ago, which is that this was a moment in which the Left Platform had the legitimacy of the referendum and somehow fumbled that opportunity?

I think it is too early to say if we lost it or not. Things are not decided on a single moment — not on that moment at least. It is a process unfolding now, and I think the real shock in the broader society is coming with the new signed agreement.

At this stage, what I can say is that the decision of the Left Platform is to reclaim the party and demand a party congress. I think it’s quite clear that this U-turn of Syriza has only minority support within the party.

Of course, we all know that bureaucratic manipulations of party procedures are endless and display infinite capacity to innovate. However, it is very hard for me to see how the majority of Syriza members could approve of what has been done. Essentially the leadership will ferociously resist the call for a congress. We’ll see what happens, because the statutes allow us to call for a central committee meeting and so on.

But objectively, the process leading to the disintegration of Syriza has already started. Syriza as we knew it is over and splits are absolutely inevitable. The only issue now is how they will happen and what form they will take.

However what is also likely to happen is a drastic reshaping of a governmental majority, towards some form of “national unity” or “great coalition” cabinet. The whole logic of the situation points to that direction.

The four ministers of the Left Platform will leave the cabinet this week and tomorrow’s vote in parliament on the agreement will validate the existence of a new pro-austerity majority, regrouping most of the Syriza’s MPs and all other parties, with the exception of the KKE and the Nazis. It is expected that as many as forty Syriza MPs will reject the agreement and they might be followed by some from the Independent Greeks. Already the leader of To Potami behaves like a minister in waiting and the Right discusses quite openly the possibility of joining the government, although no such decision has been taken yet.

But what you are describing is the Left Platform acting as a disciplined bloc. So you suggest that it is not internally fissured, that the vote was not a manifestation of such a thing but a tactical maneuver?

We had some individual losses, but they were quite limited, and we have succeeded in preserving the coherence of the Left Platform. Clearly, I think it was a mistake not to have presented our alternative plan before, but a document has been submitted in the plenary meeting of the parliamentary group, and that was put forward as a common statement of the Left Platform, involving the two components of the Left Current and the Red Network. It’s absolutely crucial to maintain the coherence between those two components. But it’s even more crucial, actually, for the Syriza left to operate in a cohesive way.

There are all kinds of initiatives from beyond the ranks of Left Platform to react to what is happening. Already we know that the tendency of the so-called Fifty-Three (the left wing of the majority) has disintegrated, and there will be major realignments on that side. The key thing is for us to act as the legitimate representation of the No camp, the anti-austerity camp, which is the majority in Greek society and which has been objectively betrayed by what is happening.

And, constitutionally, is the leadership in a position to purge the party?

It is certainly in a position to purge the government, and this is a good thing. Of course, it means that the Left Platform ministers will soon be expelled from the cabinet. About the party, we’ll see.

But there are mechanisms they could use?

It’s very difficult to expel someone from the party, but we’ll see how they manipulate the procedures at the central committee level.

And you can force people to resign their seats, or not?

No, you can’t. It’s totally impossible. There has been a kind of charter adopted by all Syriza candidates elected MPs, saying they should resign from their seat if they disagree with the decision-making of the majority. But the decisions of the government haven’t been approved by any party instance. The central committee of the party, which is the only elected body by the party congress, hasn’t been convened for months. So the legitimacy of those decisions inside the party, and of course inside Greek society, is simply nonexistent.

But, if there are new elections, the party leadership can exclude people?

That’s clearly their plan. There was even talk of that happening before the referendum, during the last phase of the negotiation process when the deadlock was becoming more and more apparent — people were saying Tsipras should call for new elections and in between the elections purge all the candidates of Syriza’s left. And I think this is the type of plan they certainly have in mind. So it will be a race between the functioning and legitimacy of the party and the way to manipulate the political agenda and timetable, more particularly calling for new elections.

What is your assessment of the agreement signed last weekend between the Greek government and the Eurogroup?

The agreement is at all levels the total continuation of the shock therapy applied consistently to Greece over the last five years. It goes even further than everything that has been voted on so far. It includes the austerity package that was being consistently put forward by the troika for months, with high primary surpluses targets, increasing the revenue through VAT and all the exceptional taxes that have been created these last years, further cuts to pensions, and in public sector wages actually because the reform of the salary scale will certainly entail cuts in wages.

There also important institutional changes, with the inland revenue becoming fully autonomous from domestic political control, actually it becomes a tool in the hands of the troika, and the creation of another “independent” board, monitoring fiscal policy, and habilitated to introduce automatically horizontal cuts if the targets in terms of primary surpluses are not met.

Now what has been added, and gives a particularly ferocious flavor to this agreement, are the following: first it emphatically confirmed that the IMF is there to stay. Second, the troika institutions will be permanently present in Athens. Third, Syriza is prevented from implementing two of its major commitments like reestablishing labor legislation — there were some vague references to European best practice, but it was explicit that the government could not return to past legislation — and of course this is also true for increasing the minimum wage.

The privatization program is scaled up to an incredible level — we’re talking about €50 billion of privatization — so absolutely all public assets will be sold. Not only that, but they will be transferred to an institution, all of them, completely independent from Greece. There was talk of it being in Luxembourg — actually it will be based in Athens — but it will be completely removed from any form of political control. This is typically the kind of Treuhand process that privatized all the assets of the East Germany.

And the strongest of all these measures is that with the exception of the bill on humanitarian measures — which is very reduced of what Syriza’s program, essentially a symbolic gesture — on all the rest of the few bills passed by the government on economic and social policy, the government will have to repeal them.

And what about all these issues all the liberals and social democrats use to give politically correct arguments for austerity, namely the defense budget and the Orthodox church?

There is nothing about the church. There is a slashing of the defense budget indeed put forward, and there was a vague discussion about making the repayment of the debt more viable, while explicitly rejecting any writing off or cancellation of the debt, properly speaking.

This will change almost nothing because already the interest rate of the Greek debt is quite low, and the annual repayments are extremely stretched out over time, so there is very little you can do to alleviate the burden of the debt in that way. And we should not forget that the agreement is just a preliminary for the memorandum that will accompany a new 86 billion loan, that will of course lead to a further rise of the debt.

So the vague clause about a future reconsideration of the the terms of debt repayment an essentially rhetorical move that just allows Tsipras to say that they have now recognized the necessity of dealing with the issue of the debt. It is pure rhetoric, empty words.

Do you think it was a mistake of the government and the Left not to have done something more about the Orthodox church, the army, and the defense budget, and therefore give arguments to the other side?

This is, honestly, not the priority. The Greek debt is essentially due to the broader economic situation in the country of unsustainable growth fueled by borrowing all those previous years, and is due to the fact that the Greek state has not been properly taxing capital or the middle and upper classes. This is the core of the problem. Not the myth about the church.

It’s difficult: taxing the church is not something that can be done overnight, because the assets owned by the church are extremely diverse. Most of them take the form of companies, or revenue that comes from land, or real estate. So there is a myth about this, when actually if you tax this type of revenue and wealth properly, you also tax the church itself.

So there’s not some idea that the government was afraid of the political cost, either vis-à-vis ANEL, or more generally in the country, of taking a tough line with the church?

Look, there are many things we can criticize this government for, but honestly them trying somehow to shift the burden of responsibility to ANEL is the least relevant one.

I would even say the most shocking moves in the realm of defense or foreign policy — for instance, continuing the military agreement with Israel, carrying out joint exercises in the Mediterranean with the Israelis — all these are decisions made by key Syriza people, like Dragasakis. It’s quite telling that he was representing the Greek government in the reception given by the Israeli embassy to celebrate twenty-five years of normal diplomatic relations between Greece and Israel.

And what about the other spin people are trying to put on this: that Tsipras has reintroduced politics into these technical discussions, he’s exposed the other side for what they really are, now in public opinion Merkel and the others are shown for the monsters they really are, and so on . . ?

Inadvertently, I think this is the case. A comrade sent me a message saying it is true the Syriza government has succeeded in making the EU much more hated by the Greek people than anythingAntarsya or KKE has been able to accomplish in twenty years of anti-EU rhetoric in that field!

Let’s talk about what is to come now. There is a vote on the new austerity package this week, which you’re confident the Left Platform will vote against, an emergency congress of the party to try and regain the majority with potentially splits or expulsions. What then? A reconstruction of the Left with elements of Antarsya?

It’s early to discuss such future prospects.

But relations between the Left Platform and Antarsya have improved?

I think what was important is the fact that most sectors of Antarsya really fought with a high spirit the battle of the referendum, and in many places there were local committees involving all the forces of No, which means essentially Syriza and those sectors of Antarsya. So I think there is a political possibility that needs to be explored.

However, I’m not that optimistic about Antarsya as such because I think the glue that holds this whole coalition together is still traditional ultra-leftism. We can already see that what they say of this defeat is that they have been vindicated, this is the failure of all left reformisms, and what we need is a properly revolutionary party, and of course that they are the vanguard that constitutes the core of that party and they will continue down that road. So I think there will be some recomposition, but I expect that to be on a limited scale.

And, potentially, some social movement activity today, talk of a general strike in the public sector?

This is the most decisive factor still unknown. What is the bigger picture now? We have a new memorandum, and we have a reconfiguration of the parliamentary majority that is behind this new memorandum. This will be symbolically validated by the forthcoming vote, where we will see most of Syriza MPs voting together once again with pro-austerity parties for a new memorandum, and once again we have a gap between the political representation of this country and the people. So this contradiction needs to be resolved.

Clearly this field is now open for the Nazis. They will certainly try to make the best use of it. They have already voted against the Greek proposal, they will certainly vote against the new memorandum, they will certainly call it a new betrayal. The big question is what will be the level of social mobilization against the tsunami of measures that will fall now on the shoulders of the working people and of course the absolute urgency of reconstituting a fighting, anti-austerity left. That’s the main challenge of course.

We know we have some elements to reconstruct the Left, we know the heavy responsibility lies on the shoulders of Syriza’s left, in the broad sense of the term. In the narrowest sense of the term an even heavier responsibility lies on the shoulders of the Left Platform because it is the most structured, coherent, and politically lucid part of that spectrum of forces. So that will be the test of the coming months.

Let’s step back a bit and look at the process as a whole, and the first interview you gave to Jacobin: first on the broad strategic question of the Left Platform working within the government and within social movements simultaneously, what is your balance sheet on that?

First of all let’s start with the broader picture. What I had said in the interview is that there are only two possibilities for the Greek situation, confrontation or capitulation. So we had capitulation, but we also had confrontational moments that were very poorly led on the side of the government. That was the real test.

Obviously the strategy of the “good euro” and “left-Europeanism” collapsed, and many people realize that now. The process of the referendum made that very clear, and the test went up to its extreme limits. This was a tough lesson, but a necessary one.

The second hypothesis I formulated at the time was you need political successes, including at the electoral level, to trigger new cycles of mobilization. I think this also proved to be true, in two crucial moments.

The first was the first three weeks after the election, when the mood was very combative, confrontational, and the spirits were very high. This ended with the agreement of February 20. And, from that moment on, it was a relapse to the mood of passivity, anxiety, and uncertainty about what was going on. The second moment was the referendum, of course. Then we saw how a political initiative that opens up a confrontational sequence liberates forces and acts as a catalyst for processes of radicalization in broader society. This is a lesson we also need to take from this.

On the relation of social movements and the Left Platform now. Well, given how poor the record of the government has been, what we can say is that there have been no specific government initiatives that could open up concrete spaces for popular mobilization. Those measures were actually never taken. So this hypothesis, at that level at least, has not been tested. And what is ahead of us is something much more familiar, that is mobilizing against the policies of a government converted to extreme austerity.

More generally, Syriza implemented almost nothing of its electoral program. The best Left Platform ministers have been able to do is block a certain number of processes, particularly privatization in the energy sector that had been previously initiated. They won a bit of time, but that was all. What we also clearly saw in that period is that the government, the leadership, became totally autonomous of the party. That process had already started — we talked about it in our last conversation — but now it has reached a kind of climactic level.

It was also increased by the fact that this whole negotiation process by itself triggered passivity and anxiety among the people and the most combative sectors of society, leading them to exhaustion. Before the referendum the mood was clearly, “We can’t stand this kind of waterboarding process anymore, at some point it has to end.”

This is something personally I hadn’t foreseen. I thought the pace would be quicker. I hadn’t foreseen that this process of being increasingly trapped in this absolute deadlock lasting for so long, limiting enormously our own room for initiative.

This is the moment of course of inevitable self-criticism, which is only just starting. Clearly, the Left Platform could have done more in that period in terms of putting forward alternative proposals. The mistake is even clear because the alternative document itself was there, there was just internal hesitation about the appropriate moment to release it.

We had been neutralized and overtaken by the endless sequence of negotiations and dramatic moments and so on, and it was only when it was already too late, in that plenary meeting of the parliamentary group, that a reduced version of that proposal was finally made public and started circulating. This is clearly something we should have done before.

And what do you make of the attacks on Costas Lapavitsas’s statements about Greece not being ready for Grexit and therefore, in a sense, there being no way out? One of the problems with that formulation is that, although it’s empirically true there were no preparations for Grexit, it’s kind of a self-reinforcing statement, because the people who want Grexit would never be in the position to make the preparations.

I think that Costas’s statement has been misinterpreted. First of all Costas is one of the five people who signed the document offered by the Left Platform which makes it clear that an alternative is possible even now, immediately.

What Costas wanted to emphasize in the declaration he made, behind closed doors in the parliamentary group, is the following: that Grexit needs to be prepared for practically and that there was a political decision to not prepare anything and therefore cutting off any possibility, materially speaking, of alternative choices at the most critical moment.

It was that bridge-burning type of strategy that was very systematically put forward by the government. And I think this was the obsession more particularly of Giannis Dragasakis — he made it impossible to make any moves towards public control of the banks. He is the man of trust actually of the bankers and sectors of big business in Greece and has made sure that the core of the system would remain unchanged since Syriza took power.

And you confirm there were initial preparations for Grexit put on the table and rejected?

Very vaguely. In restricted cabinet meetings, the so-called government council, where only the ten main ministers take part, Varoufakis had mentioned the necessity in the spring to consider Grexit as a possible action and prepare for that. I think there were some elaborations about parallel currency, but all this remained quite vague and poorly prepared.

Now, as I said before, in his New Statesman interview, Varoufakis presents a narrative according to which he prepared an alternative plan during the lineup to the referendum. But this is also a confession on how belated all this came.

What would you say now — apart from the issue of pace and demoralization — you failed to understand, or understood only incompletely at the beginning of this process, that you understand better now?

I have rewound the film in my head innumerable times all these years trying to understand the moments of bifurcation. And, for me, the decisive moment of bifurcation in the Greek situation was the period immediately after the peak of the popular mobilizations in the fall of 2011 and before the electoral sequence of spring 2012.

As you might know, I was very involved with Costas Lapavitsas and other comrades including the leadership of the Left Platform at that stage, in initiatives to constitute a common project of all the anti-Europeanist left.

The discussions were quite advanced, actually, because there was even a document drafted by Panagiotis Lafazanis, and then amended by other people participating in those discussions. The idea was to open up a space of common discussions and actions between the Left Platform of Syriza, certain sectors of Antarsya, and some campaigns and social movements.

This initiative never came to fruition because it was categorically rejected, at the final stage, by the leadership of the main component of Antarsya, NAR (the New Left Current), which showed how unable they were to understand the dynamic of the situation and the need to change somehow the configuration of forces and the mode of intervention on the Left.

Once this possibility was closed off, the only remaining one was what was eventually realized. The existing forces of the radical left were put to the test, and somehow only Syriza was able to seize the momentum and give political expression to the need for an alternative.

We could say, in hindsight, that some sections of the Greek left that were less tied to party politics could have taken a Podemos type of initiative, or perhaps more realistically, a Catalan CUP-type of initiative with sectors perhaps of the far left but of the more movementist tenor.

But, once again, there were no such sectors ready to do that. Everyone was much too linked to the limitations of the existing structures, and the only attempt to redistribute the cards failed to materialize, in this case because the weight of traditional ultra-leftism proved too strong.

Is there anything you want to add?

Yes, I want to add a more general reflection about what is the meaning of being vindicated or defeated in a political struggle. I think what, for a Marxist, is necessary is a kind of historicized understanding of these terms. You can say, on the one hand, that what you’ve been saying is vindicated because it’s proved true.

It’s the usual I-told-you-so strategy. But, if you’re unable to give a concrete power to that position, politically you are defeated. Because, if you are powerless and you have proved unable actually to transform your position into mass practice, then obviously politically you haven’t been vindicated. That’s one thing.

The second thing is not everyone has been defeated in the same way and to the same extent. I want to stress that. I think it was absolutely crucial for the internal battle inside Syriza to have been waged.

Let me be clear about this. What was the other option? Having passed the test of that decisive period, both KKE and Antarsya have proved, in very different ways of course, how irrelevant they are. For us, the only alternative choice would have been to break with the Syriza leadership sooner. However, given the dynamic of the situation after this crucial bifurcation of the late 2011 to early 2012 moment, that would have immediately marginalized us.

The only concrete result I can see would be to add a couple more groups to the already ten or twelve groups constituting Antarsya, and Antarsya instead of having 0.7% being at 1%. That would mean Syriza would have been offered entirely on a platter to Tsipras and the majority, or at least to those forces outside the Left Platform.

Now in Greek society, it’s clear that the only visible opposition to what the government is doing from the left is KKE. You can’t deny that, but they are totally irrelevant politically. We haven’t talked about the role of the KKE during the referendum, but it was an absolute caricature of their own irrelevance. They called actually for a spoiled vote, they asked the voters to use the ballot papers they’ve made themselves, with a “double no” written on them (to the EU and to the government). These papers were of course not valid the whole operation ended up in a fiasco. The KKE leaders weren’t followed by their own voters, about 1% of the voters overall, perhaps even less, used those invalid ballot papers.

And, aside from them, there is the Left Platform. Greek people know, and the media constantly repeat that, that for Tsipras, the main thorn is Lafazanis and the Left Platform. We can add Zoe Kostantopoulou to this. I think that’s what we’ve gained from that situation. We have a basis from which to start a new cycle, a force that has been at the forefront of that political battle and carries this unprecedented experience.

Everyone understands that if we fail to be up to the challenge, it will indeed be a landscape of ruins for the Left after this.

From that perspective, which is the perspective of the reconstruction of the anticapitalist Left, without pretending that we are the only force that will play a role, we recognize how major the stakes are, which puts a very high responsibility on what we will be doing in the here and now.

The Left once more is at a crossroads.
If their candidates dont get past in the first round of the Municipal elections eg in Athens with Dourou and Golden Dawns Kasidiaris gets through with Kaminis (PASOK) then they will be obliged to vote PASOK (constitutional arrow as they call themselves) either openly or according to each individuals conscience (however they sell it).

The anti-MoU fake Left will be seen then to be propping up Merkels 4th Reich in Athens openly and electorally. The rest as they say will be history.
VN Gelis

Courteousy of Irish Left Review
http://www.irishleftreview.org/2014/05/13/greece-eve-municipal-european-parliament-elections-riddle-waiting-solved/#comment-327822

The double Greek elections of May 18th and 25th –municipal and regional on 18th and the European Parliament elections together with the second round of municipal and regional ones where necessary on 25th– will undoubtedly influence decisively the course of the country. They will reflect the evident as well as underground trends in Greek social and political life developed in the period after the elections of May and June 2012.

Given the specificity of the situation in Greece, which became during the last few years the workshop and test field for the most brutal neoliberal policies, forged by the Brussels European Union directory and applied by the conservative Greek government of New Democracy and PASOK, Greek elections are perhaps more critical than the respective ones in other European countries. The elections will be a crucial test for the two major political parties, the ruling conservative New Democracy (ND) party and the left opposition, SYRIZA, but they will also be critical for all other Greek political forces. The main issue, which is of great importance not only for the Greek but for the European Left as well, is whether SYRIZA, the stronger left formation presently in Europe, will be able to achieve a clear electoral victory, or if the ruling ND party will achieve a satisfactory result, such as a defeat –let alone a victory– on points. There are, of course, a series of other questions, less critical but not negligible, to be answered in these two evenings, regarding the results of the other parties.

However, with just about a week separating us from the first Sunday, most commentators agree on only one thing: that everything is completely vague and the election night will certainly present us with some big surprises. This impression is further strengthened by recent developments, shortly before and during the election period, which did not give a clear lead or superiority to any party: on the one hand, the Baltakos case undoubtedly cost the government a lot; on the other, some retractions by SYRIZA on the selection of candidates and also on the issue of the Turkish speaking minority in Thrace did not make a good impression. The situation reveals a similarly confusing picture in relation to the other political forces. While some trends do emerge, it is not at all certain how they will crystallize. The prevailing big uncertainty is reflected in most polls so far, which often produce greatly conflicting results for all parties.

In the following, we will consider first the general political scene and its tendencies in recent years. Then we will examine the developments and contrasts in the main formations of the Left, SYRIZA, KKE and ANTARSYA, and the problems of strategy and tactics that have been raised mainly in connection with the country’s relations with the EU, which are also a key dimension of the ongoing political controversy.

1. The General Political Picture

What impresses one, even at first glance, is the fragmentation and liquidity of the Greek political scene today. This is a feature of the new political system that emerged in the May 2012 elections, replacing the ND and PASOK two-party system which had been dominant since 1977. However, given the partial polarization in the elections of June 2012, one would expect a relative domination of the two major parties, albeit not to the extent of the ND and PASOK before the onset of the crisis. Quite the opposite is true, with a number of 46 parties taking part in these European elections, a great record compared with the 27 of the previous ones.

Certainly, most of these “parties” do not claim a serious political role. They include 4 or 5 far Left groups, which usually elicit a few votes from the elderly and illiterate voters of the KKE, who confuse their ballot with that of the Communist Party. One will find even some fans of John Kapodistrias (the first governor of Greece after the 1821 revolution), two parties with the word “Hope” in their title, a party called “Drachma” (the old national currency before the country’s accession to the euro), the “Rural Livestock Party of Greece”, the “Party of Greek Hunters” (which however usually receives a decent 1%) and so on.

There’s even a party whose title may contain more words than the number of votes it will get in the elections. It is called “Independent Left Renewal, Right Renewal, PASOK Renewal, ND Renewal, No to War, Party of the I Donate Land Business, I Annul Debts, I Save Lives, I’m Saving the Riches of the Greeks, Greek All Workers Labor Movement”. Its completely unknown leader, Miltiadis Tsalazidis, may not be a good politician, but seems to be at least a good humorist…

Eccentricities aside, we nonetheless can count some 15 formations, which will try to win voters. Chief among those who will claim to win a MEP seat are:

1. ND, the ruling party, led by Prime Minister Antonis Samaras.

2. SYRIZA, the Left main opposition party from 2012, under Alexis Tsipras.

3. Elia – Democratic Alignment, an evolution of PASOK, under Evangelos Venizelos, key partner of the Samaras government.

4. DIMAR [Democratic Left], under Fotis Kouvelis, who also participated in the coalition government with New Democracy and PASOK, but withdrew in June 2013. It takes part in these elections as “Democratic Left – Democratic Cooperation”.

5. KKE, the ultra-Stalinist Communist Party of Greece, under Dimitris Koutsoubas, who replaced the former Secretary Aleka Papariga in 2013.

6. ANEL [Independent Greeks], a right nationalist anti-memorandum party, under Panos Kammenos.

7. Golden Dawn, the neo-Nazi party, with most members of its parliamentary group being now in custody following the lifting of immunity for their involvement in criminal acts by the Greek parliament. As there is a chance of not being allowed to take part with this title, the neo-Nazis have also secured the alternative “National Dawn”.

8. The River, a new systemic party, under the journalist Stavros Theodorakis, which is trying to establish itself as a new reserve of the system, replacing the worn formations of the Center-Left.

9. Greens, Solidarity, Ecology, Creation. The ballot of the Ecologist Greens, Greek equivalent of the European Greens (in 2009 they had secured a seat).

In addition, some other formations will seek to make a surprise, achieving in the first place a good result:

10. ANTARSYA, a coalition of organizations of the extra-parliamentary anticapitalist Left.

11. Plan B, also a formation of the extra-parliamentary Left, under the former SYRIZA President Alekos Alavanos.

12. Bridges, a transformation of Action, a neoliberal formation that took about 1% in 2009 and 2% in the 2012 parliamentary elections.

13. LAOS, the far-right party of George Karatzaferis, who failed to enter the Greek parliament in 2012, but had two MEPs elected in 2009.

14. Union for the Country and People, a formation with several known figures of the “Popular Right” (Polidoras, Zois, Psomiadis, etc.) who withdrew from ND and ANEL.

15. The Unified Allpeople’s Front, a nationalist supposedly “Left” formation led by Dimitris Kazakis (it can gather some male votes, mainly because of the beauty of its candidate, actress Katerina Moutsatsou…).

16. The Socialist Party of Stephanos Tzoumakas, an old PASOK cadre.

A similar flood of candidates appears in the municipal and regional elections. In the Municipality of Athens we find 14 candidates (vs. 8 in 2010) and in the Municipality of Thessaloniki 15 (vs. 9 in 2010).

Polls, as already mentioned, do not give a clear prediction or, indeed, even some serious and credible evidence of trends in the voting preferences of the electorate. Moreover, some strong objections and criticisms are made concerning the methodology behind these polls, while it is rumored that some companies correct profitably the results to favor the government. It is also said that secret polls conducted on behalf of the big parties give completely different results than those publicly announced and that, in any case, the reported results concern only 50% of respondents, since the rest refuse to answer. But even if you choose to ignore all this, it is certain that there are almost as many different predictions about the outcome as the number of polling companies, with few points of agreement and great divergences on the rest.

Regarding the first place in the European elections, predictions appear divided. A poll by Pulse, published on May 2nd, gave a clear lead of 3.5% for SYRIZA (21.5% versus 18.5% of ND). Another one by Metron Analysis on May 5th showed, however, a marginal edge of half a unit for ND (20.6 % vs. 20% of SYRIZA). Such was the finding of the survey of E-voice on May 2nd (21% versus 20.2 % for ND). Yet a new poll by Pulse on 5/5 gave SYRIZA a lead again, this time smaller, of the order of 1.5% (22% versus 20.5% of ND)1. The majority of respondents forecasts a SYRIZA victory, but also expresses a preference for prime minister in the person of the head of ND and current Prime Minister Samaras.

The picture shows several ups and downs for other parties as well. The Golden Dawn, seems to recover after the Baltakos case, keeping in most polls the third place. Although rates vary from 4.3 to 10%, it receives generally an equal or higher percentage than that of the previous national election (7%), a proof that the neo-Nazi danger remains strong. Similar rates of 6.8 to 10% are drawn by The River of Stavros Theodorakis, also competing for third place, but with declining trends in recent measurements.

The only point of agreement between all polls seems to concern the parties of the Center-Left, PASOK and DIMAR, which are facing extinction. The pasokite Elia carries it off slightly better, gathering rates from 2.5 to 7%, with DIMAR ranging between 1.4 and 3%. However, Elia’s percentage is in fact disastrous, not only compared with the high PASOK levels of 40% some years ago, but also with its 14% result of May 2012, impelling its President Venizelos to threaten with elections if the party falls too low, in order to win some votes. Things are bad for ANEL, the anti-Memorandum Right, too, seeing their rates fall around 3 to 4% from 10 and 7.5% of the general elections of 2012. The Stalinist KKE, on the other hand, seems to be making a recovery of a yet undetermined extent, with polls giving it from 3.4 to 6.5% with upward trends. It is a reasonable result, since the European elections lack the pressure of the parliamentary ones to elect a government, which had cost KKE dearly in 2012. So, it is expected that they will now regain some of the voters they lost then.

The remaining parties, Greens, LAOS, Bridges and ANTARSYA, oscillate between 1-1.5%. Of course, all polls display a significant percentage of undecided voters, ranging about 10-15%. This and the high uncertainty about the level of abstention, make things even more unpredictable.

If we take into account forecasts for municipal elections in the four major municipalities, Athens, Thessaloniki, Piraeus and Patra, the picture becomes even more chaotic. In Athens and Thessaloniki, the two major cities which will determine who wins impressions, the current mayors, Kaminis and Boutaris, have a clear advantage – Kaminis achieving rates over 20% and Boutaris well over 30%. The strange thing is that these mayors were elected as “independent” in 2010, but with the support of PASOK and DIMAR, the two parties heading for disaster in these elections. The reason of their popularity, of course, is not their PASOK-DIMAR support, which no one remembers and they themselves do not dare mention, but the fact they both proved capable, even if colorless, technocrats. Good performance levels, around 30%, are also scored by the current mayor of Piraeus Michaloliakos, supported by ND, and of the ND candidates in Athens, Spiliotopoulos (15%, another “rebel” ND candidate, Kaklamanis, taking around 10%) and in Thessaloniki, Kalafatis (22%).

On the other hand, SYRIZA’s candidates in the four major cities are scoring quite low in the polls, closer to the old rates of SYRIZA, rather than those of the general elections of 2012. SYRIZA’s leadership, in a controversial choice, decided upon the candidacies of second line party figures in the large municipalities, not necessarily of poor level but rather unknown to the general public. Seemingly, it wished to shed weight in the European elections (where SYRIZA really presents a strong ballot). However, this is a quite risky choice since the first round of municipal elections takes place a week earlier, and a possible failure of the SYRIZA candidates in the large cities to enter the second round, will create a negative atmosphere for the European elections, too.

The administrative divisions of Greece [wikipedia]

In Athens, the young SYRIZA contender Gabriel Sakellaridis started, perhaps due to inexperience, quite low and languidly. Along the way, however, he improved his image and he is now the only big city SYRIZA candidate –if we believe the polls– with a serious chance to make it to the second round. In the last GPO poll he stands third, just a point below the ND candidate and with upward trends, while the outcome of the second round with Kaminis as rival looks open, with the current mayor being ahead in preferences by 5.4% (38.1 to 32.7). In other major cities, the percentages of SYRIZA candidates range around or below 10%, a typical case being that of Mitafidis in Thessaloniki, to whom the same poll gives just 8.7%.

The impression that SYRIZA’s choices in the municipal elections were not the best, is strengthened by forecasts about the largest district of Attica, where Rena Dourou, a prominent SYRIZA cadre, passes comfortably in the second round, with Yiannis Sgouros as rival. Sgouros, a representative of PASOK and current prefect, is PASOK’s last card to convince, if he wins, that it is still politically existent.

One of the Athens candidate mayors is Kasidiaris, the “star” of the Golden Dawn, who became internationally known for his audacious attack on Rena Dourou and Liana Kanelli (a media personality collaborating with the KKE), during a television show in June, 2012. Initial polls showed Kasidiaris had several chances to get into the second round, but then he experienced a fall. However, in the last GPO poll he appears to be jut 1.5% below the SYRIZA candidate, the three candidates, Spiliotopoulos, Sakellaridis and Kasidiaris, ranging between 12.5 and 15%, as compared with 20.8% of Kaminis.

If these trends are confirmed, given that polls tend to lower the rates of the Golden Dawn (inter alia, because many of its voters do not say openly that they will vote it), then the question who will confront whom in the second round in Athens is completely open. This provides further evidence that the neo-Nazi danger in Greece is far from being eliminated or reduced.

2. Greek Developments After the 2012 Elections

The ambiguity of the Greek political scene is certainly connected with the fact that we are still at the beginning of the election period, not to mention the traditionally loose character of European elections in Greece. There are, however, a series of annoying issues to the Left common opinion, not only in Greece but possibly abroad as well, which cannot be answered with reference to present conjunctures alone: How does the ruling ND party, despite its extreme reactionary and unpopular policies, manage to retain a significant electoral base? And why is SYRIZA, following its momentous rise of the 2012 elections, unable to take advantage of the government’s obvious impasse and gain an undeniable superiority? To answer these questions, it is necessary to say a few things about the social and political developments in Greece after the 2012 elections.

The 2012 elections took place in a political climate favoring the Left. The first Memorandum of May 2010 and the second Memorandum of February 2012 had caused a sharp deterioration of the people’s life, throwing hundreds of thousands of citizens who previously had a tolerable standard of living to poverty and unemployment. As a result, massive protests grew throughout 2011, particularly in May and June, known as the “Indignant Movement”. Although this movement involved citizens of conservative and nationalist beliefs as well, its basic direction was undoubtedly radical, as was the case in other European countries where similar movements developed. The demonstrations, quite often with hundreds of thousands participating, continued throughout the period of July-October 2011, culminating in the national anniversary of October 28, when the government officials were booed by the people, forcing the government to cancel parades in many cities. Mass demonstrations went on until the end of 2011, reaching their peak again on the vote day for the second Memorandum, February 12, 2012. At a huge demonstration in Syntagma, two internationally known symbols of the Greek Left, Mikis Theodorakis and Manolis Glezos received a gas treatment by the police, despite their advanced age, and had to be taken to a hospital.

The fall of the unpopular Papandreou government in November 2011, the subsequent resignation of the Papademos government, which lasted only half a year, from November 2011 to April 2012, and the march towards the May elections thus took place in an environment of intense social struggle with movements favoring a big turn to the Left. This led to the immense rise of SYRIZA, who expressed the moods of the people by advancing the slogan for a government of the Left. SYRIZA almost gained first place in both elections, May and June, causing worldwide interest.

The predominance of ND in these encounters, even if marginal, put a temporary end to the cycle of popular struggles which began in 2010. It was proved that these struggles, while shaking and disorganizing the bourgeois political regime, were not strong enough to directly overturn it. A period of fatigue and decline of the movement was inaugurated, as the militant mood of the people could not be held indeterminately at the high level of the previous two years. The situation created has some respects reminiscent of that in Russia after the defeat of the first Russian revolution of 1905, a period characterized, as Lenin said, by stagnation and insignificant, as compared with the previous stage, direct political action of the masses. Although anger and popular disapproval for the current policies were still in a majority, they were combined in the new period with a spirit of compromise and passivity, arising from the realization that there were no immediate prospects for a substantial change.

Under these conditions, taking advantage of its internal and international supports, the ND government was able to stabilize to some extent its position. Of course, in 2012-14 the economic situation remained as miserable as before and even worsened: unemployment, which in 2012 was 22.2%, climbed to 26.8% in 2013 (and to 58.13% for the young people 15-24 years old); external debt, despite the “haircuts”, soared to even more unprecedented heights; GDP, which during 2009-2012 had made a drop of 20%, was reduced by a further 5% in 2013. Sectors like trade, constructions, etc., suffered the heaviest blows. However, the ND government, based on the “primary surplus” announced for 2013, the recent “exit to the markets”, and also the process that began in September 2013 for the prosecution of the Golden Dawn’s criminal activities (after the brutal murder the Left artist-rapper Paul Fyssas by the Golden Dawn member Roupakias), was able to achieved a certain distraction. The so called “social dividend” –a kind of alms of 500 €, which began to be distributed during the current election campaign– also had some small impact on certain backward strata, living in the hope that an improvement of the economy might be followed by larger benefits.

Of course, the “success stories” of the government are largely fictitious. The surplus, e.g., amounting to some 3 billions, was not due to any real economic recovery, but to the heavy taxation of the people, and instead of being used to reduce unemployment, was largely handed (1 billion € of it) to the lenders. Even the supposed development of 0.6% in 2014, predicted by the government and the EU institutions, was refuted just a few days ago by the OECD, which envisaged a further decline of 0.3% for this year, and this under the favorable condition of continued development in the rest of Europe 2. The most all this can achieve is to arrest the fall of the government and not lead it to a political recovery. Moreover, the Golden Dawn story was turned to a boomerang for the government after the revelations about the underground discussions between its Secretary-General Panagiotis Baltakos and Kasidiaris. In these scenes, filmed by the Golden Dawn, Baltakos was shown conversing with Kasidiaris about the lifting of the Golden Dawn’s deputies immunity, clearly taking their side, with arguments more suited to a member of the Golden Dawn than of the government3. Even if the Golden Dawn’s persecution was a victory of the movement, this incident came to show the extremely limited possibilities of a genuine fight against fascism through the institutions of the bourgeois state.

On the other hand, the retreat of the movement in 2012-14 did not mean, as is often argued, a passing to a state of complete resignation and indifference. Apart from struggles conducted at that time, like against the government’s closure of public television in June 2013, oppositional undercurrents are developing and a gradual assimilation of the protests of the past two years takes place. The current difficulties of SYRIZA and the criticisms that may be exercised to its post-2012 course are focused precisely on the way it handled this transitional and complex situation.

Some forces, like ANTARSYA in the main, accuse SYRIZA of making a right turn in this period, abandoning his earlier radicalism and adopting a tactic of waiting for power to fall into its hands of as a “ripe fruit” through the continuous wear of the government. Another aspect of this shift, they say, was the opening of the party to forces and personalities from PASOK, who distorted even further its Left physiognomy.

This criticism, which is based on a number of facts, generally loses sight of the fact that the ebb of the movement during the last two years required some adjustments. When in 1921, at the Third Congress of the Comintern, the young communist movement had been faced with a similar situation of a retreat of the revolution, Lenin had urged the Communists not to be afraid to make under such circumstances some right wing adjustments. He characteristically suggested “not to fear to say that we came back from Moscow other people, more careful, more considerate, more opportunistic, more to the right. This”, he said, was under the given situation “the only correct strategy”4.

Both the neo-Stalinist leadership of the KKE, for which SYRIZA has always been an opportunist formation in the service of the system, and the leadership of ANTARSYA, reject the above position. In their analyses they consistently start from the premise that right adaptations are unacceptable under all circumstances5. A criticism that takes account, however, of the character of the period, should focus not so much on the fact that SYRIZA made ? right-wing ?adjustments, but that they were more numerous and larger than necessary. Such a criticism will definitely bring to light not only the ambiguities and vacillations of SYRIZA, but also the strategic gaps and misconceptions of the other formations of the Left, first and foremost of the KKE, but of the rest of them too.

Before moving to this, we will just note that the observed SYRIZA “halt” is due to a combination of factors, the demonstration of which requires serious analysis and cannot be reduced dismissively to the effect only of the, actual or alleged, right turn. From a small party, which lagged far behind KKE in the past and was permanently on the margins of political life –in the 1993 elections, as “Coalition of the Left” [Synaspismos], it had not even managed to get into the Parliament– SYRIZA was transformed in the 2012 elections to a party with great popular following. It is a party that in many ways resembles the old EDA [United Democratic Left], the Greek Left formation that in the 1950s and 1960s, when the Communist Party was illegal, had significant electoral presence, culminating in its emergence as major Opposition in 1958.

The objective difficulty to accomplish the necessary adjustments in such a short period of time, despite the advance made by converting SYRIZA to a united party at the 1st Congress of July 2013, the ongoing conflict between various groups with differing political perspectives and excessive rightist adjustments were the factors that combined to cause –to the extent it really exists and will be ascertained in the coming elections– a relative halt after the impressive 2012 campaign. And that, having occurred in a background of relative decline of the movement, is not a permanent situation, but it is one which certainly requires serious and careful strategic reorientations, so as to keep open the case of radical social change in the country.

3. Conflicts and Strategic Problems in the Greek Left

One thing that is often heard in discussions within the Greek Left is that the unity of its main components, SYRIZA, KKE and ANTARSYA, would assure its victory at the next election, even under the current polling rates, without counting the additional dynamics it will create. It is a position put forth by people who understandably resent the historical fragmentation and sterile rivalries that mark the history of the Greek Left. But as justified this discomfort is, expressed some months ago by Mikis Theodorakis, fragmentation remains a fact and cannot be removed by general appeals for unity. Only a serious, grounded discussion of the open strategic problems of the movement will show where there are real convergences and differences, helping to set aside those who exaggerate insignificant points of dispute.

The main strategic problem which divides the SYRIZA majority from its minority and the ANTARSYA groups, concerns the question of the attitude towards the euro and the European Union. The majority, uniting the center and the right wing of the party under its charismatic leader, Alexis Tsipras, leaves the question open, considering that when the Left government is formed, it will either find a mutually satisfactory solution through negotiations with the EU or else will have to take unilateral actions that can reach exit from the EU. The Left wing, led by the capable parliamentary party spokesman Panagiotis Lafazanis, argues that the first act of the government of the Left should be cessation of debt payments and an exit from the euro, a position pretty much shared by ANTARSYA and Plan B (the latter considers that the exit from the euro and the eurozone can be combined with staying in the European Union, at least for some time). KKE finally, after a long period of snubbing the debt issue, sided in the end in favor of a denial of payment, but declaring that this can be done only by a revolutionary people’s power which proceeds to overturn capitalism.

Strategic discussions in Greek Left are particularly important, among other things because they are closely connected with how each component faces the issue of alliances. The truth is however that while being interesting, they most often lag behind from historical demands. In some cases they even resemble a “talk between deaf” with each part providing a ready position, without considering how specific conditions can push in the direction of one or the other option.

Relatively recently, in December 2013, a significant book for the government of the Left was released6, with a collection of contributions presenting the views of all sides (except from the KKE). Let’s take a look at the various positions and approaches utilizing this edition.

3.1. The SYRIZA majority

The position of the SYRIZA majority has been expressed repeatedly by Tsipras himself and other leading cadres. In the collection mentioned, it is comprehensively developed by Yiannis Dragasakis, the SYRIZA Vice President of the Parliament and main party authority on economy.

Dragasakis stresses that an authentic left strategy should be one that “does not exclude neither negotiation nor unilateral action as elements of a strategy that unfolds according to the evolution of the relation of forces… In the sense that a government of the Left forms a framework of demands which it initially seeks to be accepted by negotiations. But it reserves the right to make unilateral actions and ruptures with the support and consent of the people if confronted by blackmail or unreasonable demands”7.

This conception is very much reminiscent of Serrati’s centrist position. Serrati, the Italian socialist leader, from 1919 to 1921, in a situation pregnant with revolutionary chances in Italy but with many unclear aspects as well, stressed the need for a flexible, non-binding in a specified direction, line. In a criticism of his views, Lenin recognized that this approach had an important element of correctness: “[Serrati] repeats a thought: the need for a flexible tactics. An unquestionable though”. But Lenin continued to show that, in the given circumstances, Serrati’s flexibility had the wrong sign: “Yet the whole issue is just that Serrati is leaning to the right, when he has to lean to the left, in the specific Italian conditions. The Italian party, in order to successfully make the revolution and defend it, still needs to take a certain step to the left (without tying its hands and without forgetting that later events may very well require some steps to right)”8.

While it is true that the Greek movement is currently in a phase of retreat, calling for some right-wing adaptations, it is clear that the formation of a SYRIZA government will be preceded or immediately followed by a new rise of the movement. Under these conditions, one should opt for a more left-wing politics, a politics accomplishing the appropriate and mature raptures, rather than a policy of compromises.

To better illustrate this point, let’s take a look at another formulation of Y. Dragasakis. In the same article, noting that the primary question that can unite the Left “is not which forces favor the euro and which the national currency”, but the overthrow of the ruling (neoliberal) policy and of the process of social fascization, he concludes: “On this basis, if one can claim a viable exit from the euro, the same correlation of forces could perhaps provide a different regime of cohabitation within the euro or even a new structure of the euro… the outcome [of a possible exit from the euro]… will be determined by the balance of power in the country attempting it, as well as in the eurozone and the rest of the world”9.

The above argument essentially ends up to saying that the change of the situation can be attempted by reform and by measures of a revolutionary type and that both ways are equally legitimate and possible. History shows, however, that in cases of great crisis, a progressive way out is possible, provided there is a favorable relation of forces, only with revolutionary measures, while an attempt to exploit this favorable relation in a reformist way, results in the wastage of the favorable conditions. In the very typical case of the Popular Fronts in France and Spain during 1935-37, for example, some significant revolutionary possibilities certainly appeared. However, the insistence of the Stalinist communist parties to address the issues in a reformist way meant to settle for some minor demands, leaving intact the economic structures and bases of the reaction, which was able to counterattack later, canceling any concessions it had made. This danger, revealed most clearly and tragically in the case of the Allende government in Chile, still lurks today, as long as the lessons of history are not sufficiently realized.

Let us indeed suppose that a government of the Left is formed in Greece, based on SYRIZA, and simultaneously an improved international relation of forces is created (a rise of movements in the rest of Europe), which allows to contest for both revolutionary and reformist solutions. A revolutionary solution to the given situation would be the exit of some small countries from the EU and the beginning of an independent and equitable integration process of their own, much like the one promoted by Chavez in Latin America. A reformist solution would be pressure for the introduction of the Eurobond, which would allow all countries to borrow on equal terms, thereby restoring a certain rate of protection and equality for the poorest countries. Suppose also, for the sake of argumentation, that both possibilities are at some point equally realistic in terms of the relation of forces. Everyone will see that the first option, although more difficult in general, is incomparably more radical, because it would allow the countries exiting from the EU effective independence, freedom and the possibility of introducing progressive transformations, such as workers’ control and so on. In the second case, by contrast, these small countries would remain in many respects under the domination of the big powers of the EU, which would put strong constraints on any further changes.

This, however, does not fully settle the issue. For it is really possible, and quite probable in fact, that a first positive shift in the relation of forces may take place, which will allow claiming reforms such as the Eurobond but not suffice yet for a revolutionary upheaval. In such a case, a government of the Left under SYRIZA, could actually embark on reform initiatives, such as an alliance with other small countries for the Eurobond. But it is clear that a thing like that, if achieved, would only be a partial positive conquest and the main social conflicts would still remain to be solved.

Similar positions to those of Y. Dragasakis have been expressed by a number of well known SYRIZA cadres. Sophia Sakorafa, who came to SYRIZA from PASOK in 2011, in her contribution to the same collection, notes that “the abolition of the Memorandum” and “an effective debt reduction… if needed should be imposed even unilaterally”10. Similarly, Rena Dourou, after referring to the need for a “tough negotiation” with the lenders, adds: “A government of the Left must be prepared for any eventuality. For all developments. It must elaborate alternative solutions”11.

On the other hand, some cadres of the SYRIZA majority express definitely right-wing positions. In one typical case, the economist George Stathakis said a few months ago that only 5% of the public debt is odious. That would imply that there is no room even for a negotiation, and the country must honor its obligations faithfully. Yet clearly this is not the case. The loan agreement of 80 billion € in 2010, for example, was not ratified by the Greek parliament, which leaves room for a leftist government to contest it.

3.2. The Left Current

The Left Current was the SYRIZA trend which stressed, after the beginning of the crisis, that in order to overcome it, it is necessary to cancel a big part of the debt. This requires a payment default, a move incompatible with the country staying in the eurozone, which necessitates the fulfillment of its obligations set by the successive Memoranda. A similar position was taken by ANTARSYA and economists like Costas Lapavitsas, who contributed greatly to initiate a lively discussion on the issue and to inform the public, at a time when the media shamelessly resorted to scaremongering about the “dire consequences” of such a choice.

A weakness of the Left Current lies in its advancing the “exit from the eurozone” strategy in a one sided way, without really considering the tactical conditions for its success. The exit from the eurozone is a drastic action which implies a radical conflict with the major powers and bodies of the EU. In order to be successful this move should have the support of the Greek people, who will be convinced by their very experience for its necessity. And it should also be undertaken at an appropriate moment, a moment of ascending movements in Greece and internationally, to provide strong international solidarity and a realistic chance that it will be soon followed by some other countries. These conditions do not yet exist and it is uncertain that they will exist in a sufficient degree when the government of the Left comes about. Even in Greece itself, despite the crisis, public opinion is divided, combining the requirement for debt cancellation with a support for staying in the Euro. Therefore, an exit from the Euro should be prepared thoroughly and not be the first and immediate step of a left government. Otherwise, the dangers of failure may be great. Obviously, just as it is true that a decisive radical overturn in Greece will give strong impetus to the movements of other countries, it is equally true that an untimely break and defeat of the Left in Greece, will throw back the movements in other countries too.

An article by Yiannis Tolios, a well known Marxist economist, candidate MEP with SYRIZA’s list and cadre of the Left Current, written jointly with the author of this text, deals somewhat with these aspects. It notes that “the necessity in economic and political terms, of a rupture with the eurozone mechanisms doesn’t mean that this rupture must be implemented in the first day after the government of the Left is formed. The political flexibility in choosing the right moment, after making the appropriate preliminary maneuvers and exhausting any possibilities of substantial negotiations is necessary, as it will help convince the big majority of the Greek people for the necessity of this option”12. However, this approach is not generally dominant in the Left Current, which at the 1st SYRIZA Congress presented its positions in a “pure form”, the result being to see the amendments it made rejected by the majority of delegates 13. Issues such as the Eurobond are not even discussed in its ranks, as it is incorrectly considered that such an option would in all circumstances mean a capitulation to opportunism.

But this is not the main problem. The main weakness of the Left Current is its unrealistic policy of alliances, aiming to change the position of the KKE leadership on the issue of the cooperation of the Left, so as to make the choice of exit from the EU a majority current within the Greek Left and within a left governmental cooperation. This is a totally unrealistic assumption, since the KKE for over twenty years now after breaking the Coalition of the Left in 1991 refuses any cooperation not only with SYRIZA (as it did with Synaspismos before it was transformed to SYRIZA) but with the Left Current as well, many cadres of which come from the KKE. In the official organ of the KKE, Rizospastis, 2 or 3 articles appear daily, where SYRIZA and the Left Current are stigmatized as opportunists who seek to dissolve the Communist Party, using cooperation proposals as a Trojan horse. To expect that the KKE leadership can change its policy on the issue of alliances, when its negative attitude has become during the last years ten and a hundred times more determined, cannot be a basis for a serious left strategy, both within SYRIZA and outside it.

In practice, the result of all this is a passive stance of the Left Current, which marks time and does not create the conditions for a more radical regrouping of SYRIZA and the Left in general, hoping that this regrouping will occur in a unrealistic way. The Left Current has achieved a collaboration with some other radical SYRIZA groups like DEA (one of the Trotskyist Greek formations), but this has not been turned to an organic organizational process. The Left Current lacks its own newspaper or magazine, basing itself just on a significant website, Iskra. Of course some other factors contribute to these difficulties. Apart from some notable intellectuals such as Yiannis Tolios and Stathis Kouvelakis, the Current rallies mainly trade unionists and members of the public services sector etc., a fact with a negative impact on policy production. However, these difficulties are only covered and exacerbated by its unrealistic line on the alliances issue. On the one hand, the Current continuously lowers the tone of its criticism to the KKE, in order not to complicate the supposed future approach between them, reaching the point of discovering fantastic positive aspects in its current extremely sectarian policies. On the other hand, in this way, it avoids or hampers the actual approach with forces withdrawing from the KKE, as was done in the 19th Congress by the Workers’ Struggle group, and with other leftist groups (e.g., the Trotskyist Xekinima [Start]) operating near SYRIZA. A strengthening of the Left Current, through an approach with such other groups, would of course be beneficial, since it could counterweight any excessive Right leanings.

3.3. The KKE

The KKE tactics from 1991 onwards include a rejection of alliances with anyone who does not agree with its program (which means in practice that it makes “alliances” only with itself), a denial of proposing democratic demands such as the overthrow of Memoranda and a non-participation in the mass movements if they are not fully controlled by it. This tactic, being inextricably linked with the process of Stalinist restoration, is rooted in the counter-attack strategy developed by its leadership in the same period, a strategy completely inconsistent with the current balance of forces and the real tasks facing the movement.

The KKE leadership, both under Aleka Papariga and under Dimitris Koutsoubas who succeeded her at the 19th Congress, considers as the main task of the movement at this stage to organize a counterattack aimed at people’s power and a popular economy, which it defines in a way identified with socialism. This strategy is completely unrealistic, because none of its conditions is currently at hand or even faintly visible. In fact, the whole period after the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 was a period of retreat of the movement, which, especially after the beginning of the crisis in 2008, was combined with the brutal attack of neo-liberalism on the workers’ conquests and a strong rise of neo-fascism. Under these conditions, the primary task of the movement was not and is not to conduct a counter-attack, but the organization of defense to repel the reactionary capitalist attack. With its counterattack logic, the KKE leadership makes a wrong assessment of the character of the current stage, thus by stepping its actual tasks, for the sake of future, immature now tasks, while also rejecting the necessary means, such as a united front, to promote the presently urgent tasks. Their declarations for the socialist revolution under these conditions are no more than bubbles and the bureaucrats’ fig leaf to hide their political and ideological nakedness.

The Labor Struggle publicists, who were expelled from the KKE in its 19th Congress, for correctly arguing the necessity of democratic demands and program, and some other people argue that the KKE recent positions signify a turn to Trotskyism. They base this assertion on the fact that KKE adopts the position on the socialist character of the revolution, as Trotsky did during the interwar period. The truth, however, is that, if we assume that the KKE continues something from Trotsky, it is only some mistakes he occasionally made and not his basic position. After 1917 Trotsky generally supported the united front tactics, founded by Lenin and himself, and the logic of the transitional program. The essence of the current KKE line, however, is the refusal of both these basic strategic elaborations of the communist movement. In this way, in the name of the struggle for socialism it is in fact refusing the means –united front tactics and transitional demands– that can help the masses join this struggle, a fact resulting in extremely dogmatic, sterile and sectarian tactics.

In fact, the current policy of the KKE leadership is not derived from Trotsky, but from the Stalinist tactics of the Third Period and especially the famous “social-fascism theory”. In the same spirit the Stalinists equated the fascists with the Social Democrats as twins, the KKE leadership equates ND and SYRIZA, failing to discern any substantial difference between them. Indeed, in its European elections propaganda KKE has concentrated its attack almost solely on SYRIZA, doing in fact some of the “dirty work” of ND, which it would be a bit awkward for it to carry 14. In some recent comments in Rizospastis, they even manage to discover an affinity between SYRIZA and the Golden Dawn.

These haughty aspersions and slander are just the other side of the failure and opportunism of the KKE leadership itself, which in all key issues labors against the movement. It is characteristic that in recent years this leadership slandered the great Indignant movements and the Arab Revolutions as fake-movements incited by the imperialists, while on the other it supported and continues to support oppressive regimes like that of Assad. The KKE, which had previously taken under its protection policeman Korkoneas, the killer of young Alexandros Grigoropoulos during the 2008 youth riots, publishing a wretched apologetic vignette for him in Rizospastis, came to characterize the 84 years old fighter Dimitris Christoulas, who committed suicide in Syntagma in April 2012, calling the new generation to resist, an instrument of the bourgeoisie, on the pretext that his act was cultivating defeatism. Meanwhile, in her meeting with the President of the Republic Karolos Papoulias, during the discussions for the formation of the new government after the 2012 May elections, the then General Secretary of the KKE Papariga expressed her willingness to even sit next to Michaloliakos, the now jailed Golden Dawn leader, if she was told so by the President, explicitly recognizing that the Golden Dawn was legitimized by the support of a significant portion of the people. The apotheosis of Stalin at the KKE 18th Congress and the repetition of Stalinist slanders against Trotsky, Bukharin and others Bolshevik leaders who fell victims to the purge, as organs of fascism, was just an icing on the cake of the KKE neo-Stalinism, a cake decorated with communist candles and slogans, but emitting bureaucratic mold and stench.

These events, which can be greatly multiplied, show that KKE has become an obstacle to the struggle for socialism and that the circumstances call urgently for the creation of a new communist party, a new revolutionary vanguard that will continue the struggles and positive traditions of the communists. This requires however a continuous Marxist critique of its leadership’s policies, which will not change its stance, but will further petrify it after even a slight success in the coming elections.

3.4. ANTARSYA

ANTARSYA was created in March 2009 by ten organizations of the anti-capitalist, extra-parliamentary Left. During the intervening years it had a positive contribution to the movements, particularly the anti-fascist movement and that of solidarity with immigrants. After the onset of the crisis, it contributed to the spread of anti-capitalist consciousness. In the regional elections of 2010 it received 1.79% of the vote, electing some councilmen. However, the fact that it consists of small groups without strong ties with the masses, has a negative influence, enhancing sectarian and hegemonist or intellectualist tendencies.

A comprehensive presentation of strategic approaches within ANTARSYA is given by Panagiotis Sotiris, a university teacher and one of its key figures, in his contribution to the Topos volume. Sotiris reckons that a left revolutionary strategy must be based on “radical changes such as the direct exit from the eurozone, the prospect of disengaging from the EU, or the nationalization of banks and business strategies… when combined with a strategy of labor and social control and democratic planning” 15. This is open to the criticism already developed regarding the respective positions on the Left Current, that exit from the eurozone should be done at a favorable moment, which is not certain to directly coincide with the formation of the left government. However, Sotiris basically agrees that the formation of a left government should be a component of the strategy of the revolutionary Left. “We need to look today at the question of governmental authority –as a marginal possibility and not as a self-evident pursuit– and the challenge of a left government not in the sense of managing or rolling the system but as part of a modern revolutionary strategy that identifies possibilities and does not overlook challenges and risks”. As he notes, making a comparison with the experience of the October Revolution: “A modern revolutionary sequence… will find itself… faced by a more contradictory procedure of rise to power that will include the element of rupture and the element of continuity, both in process and as to the expectations of the working classes”16.

The ANTARSYA forces that adopt this position, argued recently for a collaboration with Plan B of Alekos Alavanos in the coming elections, which could strengthen the influence of the anti-capitalist Left, creating a base if not for a left alternative to SYRIZA, at least for a left formation that will constructively press on the future government of SYRIZA and be able to absorb a significant part of popular dissatisfaction with any faulty choices it makes. After lengthy discussions, however, rejection of cooperation ultimately prevailed, with both parts putting the blame of the failure to each other.

Regardless who will be given primary responsibility for the failure, the fact remains that the entire process left bad impressions to the people and to many activists of the extra-parliamentary Left. A common ballot of the two formations, which could have been combined with the support of Alavanos as a candidate mayor in Athens, would for the first time allow the extra-parliamentary Left a significant presence in the Greek political life, that should be its main objective in these elections. Any programmatic differences could be discussed further in the process, since there was no question of merging the two parties, but only of an electoral cooperation. As things came out, ANTARSYA and Plan B were led to quarrel on two different programmatic declarations, one presented by each side, differing really only on a few points. This development does not foretell, of course, nothing good for both formations. Almost inevitably they will remain in the next period, a period of critical battles, weak as now, without serious possibilities of actively intervening in the coming developments.

4. The Fascist Danger

In our previous analysis we have noted more than once that the fascist danger remains real despite the legal prosecutions against the Golden Dawn. This danger does not, of course, concern an immediate coming of the fascists to power, but the realistic possibility of their further reinforcement, if the Golden Dawn surpasses its 2012 rates (6.97% in May 2012 and 6.92 % in June). This, depending on how big this rise is, will not only legitimize the neo-Nazis, being a political victory for them, but it will make a further deepening of the already problematic and snag judicial proceedings against them very unlikely. All this will apply even more if Kasidiaris passes to the second round in Athens. But even retaining their forces will certainly be hailed by the neo-Nazis as a victory, a proof that they endured despite the prosecutions they suffered.

In the face of this danger, the Left has shown a strange inertia, avoiding to open a front against the Nazis before the elections. This may be due not only to its preoccupation with its own results but also to a complacency that prevailed after the Golden Dawn’s persecution, which created an illusion that as the climate of the period was anti-fascist, the fascist danger had subsided. Of course, the Greek anti-fascist movement mirrors all the general weaknesses of the Greek Left: the KKE, as with every other activity, organizes separate gatherings; SYRIZA’s participation is somewhat loose; even the organizations of the extra-parliamentary Left, who bear the brunt of the movement, fail to cooperate.

In the last days, Xekinima, one of the leading organizations in the anti-fascist movement, gave weight to the issue, noting the worrying signs and calling for an anti-fascist mobilization. An article by Takis Yiannopoulos stresses that the main danger is in Athens, where Golden Dawn records according to polls its highest percentage, while nationwide still appears to lag a bit behind the 2012 election results. And he notes: “The truth is that all reasons nourishing the Golden Dawn continue to be in force. And this will continue to strengthen it, irrespective if it goes on with its present or another name. This is also an international phenomenon. In the coming elections it is likely that the far right and Nazi parties will record their bigger postwar rates in European elections. Also the Samaras-Venizelos government and bourgeois justice do not want and cannot deal effectively with the neo-Nazis. Because they need them. Both as a potential government partner, as well as a shadowy fifth column against the movement”17.

Yiannopoulos is right that the Left cannot be based in its anti-fascist struggle on any support of the bourgeois state and its ruling elites. In fact, as the historical experience of Nazism in Germany demonstrates, in moments of crisis the bourgeoisie needs the fascist gangs to enforce social discipline, not hesitating even to surrender power to them. It is unrealistic to believe therefore that the ruling elites could decisively turn against one of their props. An attempt to dissolve the Golden Dawn would require to cut its ties with the police (it took around 50 % of the votes at police election divisions in 2012) and the state apparatus. It is instructive in this regard that Prime Minister Samaras, in an interview on May 6, stated that the Golden Dawn should not be outlawed but dealt politically18. Moreover, in March 2013, when the atmosphere, of course, was more favorable for the Golden Dawn, Kasidiaris was acquitted in a case against him for involvement in robbery and attack on a student in 2007. All these show that the prosecution of the Golden Dawn will not go far beyond such ineffective measures as those the German state had taken in 1924 and during the period of the Brüning government against the Nazis. Besides that, even a ban would not have a substantial effect as they would simply go on under a different name, although in this case it would be more likely that some serious punishments will be imposed on the accused MPs.

This does not mean, of course, that the judicial procedure against the Golden Dawn was futile or that the Left made a mistake in supporting it. The revelations made about the criminal activities of neo-Nazis, sensitized the public and prevented a more serious growth of the Golden Dawn in the upcoming election. However, the provocative stance of the neo-Nazis and their possible election gains, face the Left with the task to create a strong anti-fascist movement, the only thing that can effectively block their road. One of the main criticisms made on ?SYRIZA is that despite their participation, they had not supported as actively as they should anti-fascist initiatives in the neighborhoods.

It is also true, as Yiannopoulos notes, that the neo-Nazi danger appears now strong on a European scale, a fact having to do with the favorable conditions to fascism created by the crisis, in a way reminiscent of 1929. There is a difference however between Greece and the other EU countries. The rest of Europe is expected to have some economic growth in the coming period, which means that there is some possibility (but by no means a certainty) that the neo-Nazi rise might be slowed down a bit. Greece, however, will remain stagnant at least for two years more and will take much more time to recover, even at an elementary level. This means that the typical social conditions that favor fascism will continue to persist in Greece in their classic, pure form.

On the other hand, the possibility of Kasidiaris entering the second round puts an urgent and serious question of political tactics regarding the position of the Left in that event. It should go without saying that whoever is Kasidiaris opponent, the Left should call the people to close the way to Kasidiaris by supporting the other candidate. Unfortunately, the KKE does not understand this need. Liana Kanelli openly expressed by the end of February their readiness to abstain in the second round, even in the event of a duel between Kasidiaris and the SYRIZA candidate, Sakellaridis19. If such a position is adopted by the KKE leadership, it will be a criminal choice that will objectively transform the members and activists of KKE to aids of fascism.

5. Has SYRIZA been incorporated into the system?

While the KKE has always considered SYRIZA (and its predecessor, “Synaspismos”) a systemic party, some other left commentators, particularly from ANTARSYA, have a different view. They argue that while this was not the case in 2012, this conversion has essentially taken place during the last two years, as the shifts in SYRIZA policy substantially integrated it into the system. The question is a serious one: its answer bears heavily on the assessment of the prospects and tasks of the Left in the present stage.

There is no doubt that a number of developments in SYRIZA are a source of concern: Ambiguities in its policy have been strengthened in the last two years; several PASOK figures found a refuge in it; a series of incidents and statements show a clear mitigation of its original radicalism. Such phenomena appeared in the period preceding the elections too. SYRIZA’s electoral lists include some controversial figures, such as Dimitris Christopoulos, a university teacher and vice president of the International Federation of Human Rights, who made some unfortunate statements about the minority in Thrace, in connection with the nomination of Sabiha Suleiman20. Another example was the statements made by John Michelogiannakis, a SYRIZA parliamentary, against lifting the immunity some Golden Dawn deputies. Christopoulos remained eventually in the Syriza European elections list after Suleiman was ousted. But the left economist Costas Lapavitsas was not included, despite the fact that he received initially a proposition by the SYRIZA leadership. On the other hand, the list includes radical candidacies too, such as those of Tolios, Sakorafa, Glezos and Konstantina Kuneva, a cleaner and immigrant who was attacked with vitriol in 2008 due to her fighting for her rights in the company she worked.

In our opinion, the view about SYRIZA’s “incorporation” is not correct. That the danger of such a development or of a SYRIZA retreat to pressures has been strengthened in the last two years is a fact. To say, however, that this transformation has already taken place is an extreme exaggeration and not true. Both at the leadership and at the grassroots level, things are open and will be determined by the choices made when the SYRIZA government is formed. To declare SYRIZA a power of the system, whether it is done with a view to attract forces from its following or other calculations, affects negatively the case of the Greek Left. Criticism is necessary, but it must simultaneously be valid, based on arguments accurately assessing the real situation, and not on dismissive generalizations.

Reality shows that the system is afraid of a SYRIZA rise to the government, just because it has not been able to control it and it is deeply concerned about the social dynamics such a development would release. An incident that happened when the Topos book on the government of the Left appeared is quite enlightening. Some weeks later Dimokratia, a semi-official newspaper of the Samaras Government found it necessary to devote three pages to it, including its front page, full of alarmist attacks about its contents. The author of the articles, Manolis Kottakis, attacked furiously not only Dimitris Belantis, a representative of the SYRIZA left wing who contributed an article to the volume, but also contributors considered moderate, such as Dragasakis and Dourou. In an analysis peppered with war cries such as “extremists Red Guards of Tsipras become menacing” he came to talk about pogroms and nights of St. Bartholomew after the formation of the left government 21. All this, of course, is a sign of fear of the ruling elites, rather than a belief that they are in control.

The result of the 18th and 25th May elections will have a substantial impact on the question if these fears are confirmed. Their totally unpredictable result, reflects the complexity of the situation, one element of which is the mistakes of the SYRIZA leadership. But SYRIZA’s problems are not related only to right-wing turns, some of which may have been justified, but also to the lack of sufficient coherence between its various wings, creating doubts to the people whether it will be able to govern with a clear and effective program. The condition of this, however, is that the “adjustments” made will not cancel SYRIZA’s radicalism, which gave to it the vote of the people in 2012 and is only capable to conserve their support and trust22.

The uncertainty of the situation makes the Greek political scene look like a riddle. All possible solutions, improbable and probable ones, are current, from a glorious SYRIZA triumph to a small ND victory. However, based on the overall picture, it seems more likely that they will bring a partial victory for SYRIZA, with many still unknown variables. Whatever the outcome, the solution to the Greek enigma cannot be delayed very long. The elections on 18 and 25 May will not decide this solution, but will determine its direction.

Christos Kefalis is a chemist and writer, member of the editorial board of the Greek journal Marxist Thought

- See more at: http://www.irishleftreview.org/2014/05/13/greece-eve-municipal-european-parliament-elections-riddle-waiting-solved/#comment-327822

Greece
Syriza	26.57	6	1,472,122	-0.32	4.70	1	240,898
New Democracy	22.75	5	1,261,354	-6.91	32.29	8	1,655,636
Golden Dawn	9.38	3	521,213	+2.46	0.46	0	23,566
PASOK-Elia	8.03	2	445,290	-4.25	36.64	8	1,878,859
Potami	6.61	2	365,575	+6.61	0.00	0	0
KKE	6.07	2	337,657	+1.57	8.35	2	428,283
Ind Greeks	3.45	1	191,205	-4.06	0.00	0	0
LAOS	2.69	0	149,484	+1.11	7.15	2	366,615
	1.46	0	80,144	+1.46	0.00	0	0
	1.21	0	66,772	-5.05	0.00	0	0
Others	11.80	0	654,874	+11.80	7.17	1	367,232

Greece

Euroelections 2014

Difference 6/2012

Euroelections 2009

Party

Seats

Votes

Seats

Votes

Syriza

26.57

1,472,122

-0.32

4.70

240,898

New Democracy

22.75

1,261,354

-6.91

32.29

1,655,636

Golden Dawn

9.38

521,213

+2.46

0.46

23,566

PASOK-Elia

8.03

445,290

-4.25

36.64

1,878,859

Potami

6.61

365,575

+6.61

0.00

KKE

6.07

337,657

+1.57

8.35

428,283

Ind Greeks

3.45

191,205

-4.06

0.00

LAOS

2.69

149,484

+1.11

7.15

366,615

1.46

80,144

+1.46

0.00

1.21

66,772

-5.05

0.00

Others

11.80

654,874

+11.80

7.17

367,232

08.26.2015

Introduction: Eight months will have passed since the election of Syriza on January 25 up to the snap elections in September. During that time Syriza’s leaders play-acted their ‘opposition to austerity’ and then knelt down in submission to the ‘Troika’.

The contrast between January and now is dramatic: Syriza’s leader, Prime Minister Alexi Tsipras, aroused joy and great hope among the Greek voters with his promises to end Greece’s subjugation to the European oligarchs (the “Troika”) but now convokes snap elections exploiting the pervasive fear and misery among the population. Greeks confront a future of even greater impoverishment and despair with an entire generation bound up and delivered to forty years of debt slavery and colonial subjugation by their elected Syriza leaders.

In January, Syriza swept into office on its promise of ‘change’ without specifics. ‘Change’ turned out to be an empty slogan. Changes did take place: Changes for the worse! Since his election, Tsipras emptied the Greek Treasury to pay the EU bankers; stripped pension and municipal funds to meet IMF obligations and, worse yet, he allowed the flight of over 40 billion Euros to be transferred from Greek banks to overseas accounts - essentially de-capitalizing the financial system.

The linguistic perversion of “change” was not the worst of Syriza’s contribution to the corruption and discredit of the European left. Its slavish pillage of the economy shocked and confused the impoverished Greek majority. The voters had expected Syriza and its radical phrasemongers to do the opposite – to save the national economy and lead the country!

For a while Tsipras’s submission and betrayal was disguised by his theatrical poses of the ‘tough negotiator’ with the German bankers. His perpetual boyish grin, frozen on his face, as if to reassure his followers: “You can trust me. I will make sure Madame Merkel and company do not shove another bristly cucumber up your backsides!” Tsipras feigned resistance before the bankers, setting a stylistic template for other Syriza legislators, who likewise ‘protested and submitted’. They too came to believe that ‘their efforts’ (and not their results) deserved public approval!

Between February and April, Tsipras endured stern lectures from his overlords in the EU, returning to Greece with his silly grin and empty pockets.

Tsipras did everything possible to distract, to entertain, to bluster and deceive Syriza’s befuddled supporters.

Tsipras resorted to radical rhetoric, empty gestures and verbal defiance.

His emotional outburst were just ‘hollow farts’ (kfes pourdes in demotic Greek) in the poetic language of an insightful, indignant grandmother whose pension had been cut by 40%!

Syriza bent and broke before the predictable intransigence of their German overlords and their 28 rubber-stamping, vassal states. Syriza got nothing and worse. The more they talked, the less they achieved…

Tsipras broke the Greek financial system and then declared defeat, but not before mounting one more grand electoral fraud. Syriza announced a popular ‘referendum’ on the EU dictates and 61% of the Greek voters said ‘no’ to the EU demands. But Tsipras immediately said yes!

Tsipras accepted the complete sell-off –-‘privatization’– of all the strategic, lucrative, major and minor public enterprises, properties and sources of Greek national wealth.

There were no popular uprisings in the street on Tsipras’ capitulation: just a little ‘tempest in the teapot’ in the Greek Parliament when the “Left Platform” voted no, showed their backsides to their now ex-leader, defected and formed a new party - Popular Unity. With no mass organization and not supporting mass action, the ‘Left Platform’ just rose up on their hind legs . . . to bray out a manifesto calling for ‘popular unity’….within the confines of the Parliamentary cesspool of knaves and scoundrels. Meanwhile, Syntagma (Constitution) Square was full of pigeons and homeless vagabonds… Is this another hollow fart?

These armchair rebels, who sat in the Cabinet and slavishly followed Tsipras for seven months, engaging in sterile internal party debates and giving interviews to the dwindling bands of leftist academic tourists, while ignoring the street fighting youth, will face a new election in one month. They have the insurmountable task of convincing a cowed, confused and fearful electorate that they should unite, organize and reject Tsipras, Syriza and infinite regression.

Tsipras, for his part, will take the EU ‘bailout funds’, pay the banks and finance his own campaign. He will get free publicity from the domestic and foreign press (the Financial Times editorializes in praise of ‘his courage and good sense’) and employ an army of campaign workers with bail-out funds to obliterate the ‘Left Platform’. He will thus gain support from the Greek oligarchs and having adopted the platform of the right opposition, he has little to fear electorally from the boring old kleptocrats of Pasok and New Democracy, who cannot match his giveaways, theatrics and demagogy at the ballot box.

Disillusion and direct action—strikes, marches and fiery barricades– will set in after the September elections when Tsipras has further slashed pensions and shredded labor rights, when privatizations lead to massive layoffs at the docks, airports, power companies and oil refineries. Tsipras’ call for rapid elections was designed to secure votes from a shocked electorate before the pain of his massive sell-out is fully felt.

With time, there will be tempestuous protests, but the EU will have pillaged Greece of its present and future wealth. Tsipras’ electoral support will dwindle and tear gas will once again perfume the streets of Athens. Then, the old political whores and kleptocrats from the Right will trot out to center stage once more. And who knows, Tsipras may even form a new ‘inclusive’ coalition regime with the sluts of the right. Bankers, oligarchs and kleptocrats are not fussy about their bed-partners, even played-out traitors with boyish grins are worth a ‘romp in the sack’ if it gets them back in power…

Conclusion

The financial press and the mass media concocted an image of Syriza as “far left” or “hard left”. In fact, Syriza did everything possible to destroy the hopes of the majority of downwardly mobile Greeks desperate for a reversal of the shock austerity policies imposed by the EU.

From the very first day in office, Syriza leaders embraced the oligarchical structure of the EU, retaining the Euro currency and recognizing the illicit foreign debt.

Caged from the outset, Syriza just made a big racket, rattling the bars and pleading for a long leash and more time.

The trained eyes of the EU autocrats recognized Syriza leaders as captives, given to inconsequential political ejaculations and ‘outraged protestations’. They made no concessions: Indeed bankers decided to really punish the Greek voters for electing the clowns…

The Germans immediately sized Tsipras up as a marshmallow leftist - organically incapable of breaking out of the EU cage, of renouncing the Euro and the debt. With their long historical experience, Euro-imperialists know how to treat ‘socialist’ and ‘nationalist’ subjects, who negotiate on bended knee: “The more you kick them, the less they ask”

Tsipras begged for money to pay the European and US banks! He agreed to sell twenty-nine Greek airports to German capitalists in order to pay the German bankers.

In other words, Syriza and Tsipras have impoverished millions of Greeks and sold off all of Greece’s lucrative enterprises so that German, French and English holders of Greek bonds will not miss a single interest payment!

Was Tsipras just posing as a Prime Minister while serving as a pimp for gang rape?

According to the latest polls, the Greek people will re-elect him! The victims have gone mad!…God bless Greece –the cradle of democracy has become a roiling nest of vipers!

Social benefits in millions of Euros
	2009	2012	difference	%
Mothers benefit	470	400	-70	-14,9%
Family Benefits	722	552	-170	-23,5%
Pregnancy benefit	100	48	- 52	-52,0%
Pension benefits	16.876	21.287	4.411	26,1%
Health benefits	1.102	1.010	- 92	-8,3%
Hospital care	7.588	5.270	-2.318	-30,5%
Care outside hospitals	7.838	5.110	-2.728	-34,8%
Unemployment pay	1.611	1.423	-188	-11,7%
Disability pensions	1.515	1.276	-239	-15,8%