SYRIZA's Pyrrhic Victory, and the Future of the Left in Greece
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- Published on Saturday, 26 September 2015 21:30
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1167 .... September 27, 2015
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SYRIZA's Pyrrhic Victory, and the Future of the Left in Greece
Richard Fidler
In the wake of the September 20 Greek election SYRIZA has once again formed a coalition government with a small right-wing party, ANEL. Both parties lost votes and seats but their standing, like those of most other parties, was not very dissimilar to the results in January, when SYRIZA was first elected.
SYRIZA's 35.46% and ANEL's 3.69%, combined, were sufficient to give them a majority of 155 seats in the 300-seat parliament under Greece's electoral law, which gives 50 additional seats to the party with a plurality, in this case (as before) SYRIZA. However, voter turnout was at an all-time low, 44% of the electorate abstaining although voting is mandatory in... Greece. This means that SYRIZA was supported by only 20% of eligible voters.
And this is a very different party, and government, than the one elected in January.
SYRIZA received the highest vote of any party in January on the basis of its promise to end the brutal austerity Greece has suffered in recent years at the hands of its creditors -- the other countries that use the euro, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), referred to collectively as the "Troika." But this time neither SYRIZA nor ANEL could credibly promise opposition to austerity. They are committed to enforcing the harsh austerity terms imposed on Greece in July when Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras capitulated to the Troika only days following a national referendum in which 61% of the voters had strongly affirmed their opposition to austerity.
Moreover, SYRIZA will now govern without its left wing, which opposed submission to the new memorandum. The SYRIZA dissidents, previously grouped as the party's Left Platform, joined recently with a number of small anti-austerity parties to found Popular Unity, a self-described "social and political front to overturn the memoranda, predatory austerity, the negation of democracy, and the transformation of Greece into a European colony by means of indebtedness." However, Popular Unity, with only 2.86% of the popular vote, fell short of the 3% required for representation in parliament.
