The mistakes and missteps of the SYRIZA-ANEL government are undermining Tsipras’s narrative of credibility.
“There are three kinds of lies: the ordinary, the destructive, and the statistical”—these words were spoken in the 1890s and have gone down in history, sometimes attributed to the British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and sometimes to Mark Twain. And while their origin remains uncertain, it is certain that Alexis Tsipras of the former SYRIZA and now of the ELAS, has more than lived up to all three categories of lies…. The crowning achievement was the blackboard she maintained from 2016-2017 at the Maximos Mansion to evaluate, as prime minister, the work of the government and its ministers and to prioritize their tasks.
We never understood his conclusions back then. The final evaluations were published nearly 10 years later in the pages of “Ithaki.” There, everyone except the author and grader was publicly judged and criticized. But let’s take things from the beginning, though in reverse chronological order.
Falsified statistics
In the wake of the announcement and presentation of the new political initiative, the polls… show the former prime minister holding steady in second place, but this is likely not enough for him and his associates, who want to demonstrate—and, above all, convince others—that the Greek Left Alliance has greater momentum and… is also drawing votes away from New Democracy. The numbers, however, tell a different story.
Nearly two out of three voters for the new party are coming from SYRIZA, and only 2% (Alco) are coming from New Democracy. The actual numerical data isn’t all that useful for his narrative… political upheaval and revolution that the strategists on Amalia Avenue are dreaming of in the heat of summer. This seems to suggest a hasty move within the Left’s political complex, as well as a recycling of the same voters.
The new venture presents itself as a vehicle for “new credibility,” led by the very same political figure who made many… empty promises during the years of the SYRIZA-ANEL coalition government. Back when he promised to tear up the memoranda and ended up signing the third and most onerous one. Back when he promised a referendum to overturn the memoranda and then turned it into an agreement.
Tsipras now wants to enter the public political discourse as if this story began yesterday. He wants… to establish ELAS as the major alternative for power—and not just a… carefully crafted rebranding of the same political product and the same political leader.
The suggestion of… getting to know the new party seems utterly disingenuous—no matter how you look at it. Alexis Tsipras was elected Athens city councilor in 2006, president of the Coalition in 2008, and member of parliament in 2009. He has led the official opposition since 2012 and served as prime minister from 2015 to 2019.
It would be difficult to argue that he is a “new” or “unblemished” figure. He has been at the forefront of political life for about two decades, has served as party leader for 15 years, as prime minister for 4.5 years, and has been judged comprehensively, repeatedly, and over the long term by the voters.
The voters remain virtually the same, as do the faces of the current political establishment. Even the arguments are increasingly reminiscent of those that drove SYRIZA from 36% to single-digit percentages.
Fake promises
Tsipras’s tenure, marked by lies and fake promises, has many memorable moments, especially during the coalition government and shortly before he took office… From “Go back, Ms. Merkel, go back, ladies and gentlemen of Europe’s conservative nomenklatura,” we’ve reached the point where he says of the then-Chancellor of Germany: “She is a politician who is aware of her responsibilities and… open-minded.”
In his critique of his early… talented political maneuvers, he declared emphatically: “There are others to do the somersaults and humiliating concessions.” Instead, in a speech he gave in Heraklion in late 2014, he promised: “…we’ll beat the daouli and they (ed.: the markets) will dance… We’ll play the lyre, and they’ll dance the pentozali.”
And in July 2015, he took it to the extreme, contradicting himself yet again when he declared that “the only alternative and viable proposal is to abolish them with a single law and a single article…”
In an interview on the radio station Sto Kokkino, he stated: “I didn’t say that the memoranda can be torn up with a single law.” Or perhaps we should recall his contradictions regarding ENFIA: “It is an absurd tax; it cannot be fixed—it must be abolished,” he declared in September 2014, and in a pre-election interview, he even claimed that he did not pay the property tax for symbolic reasons. In 2015, in a speech to Parliament, he called on citizens “to support the national effort and pay the final installments of ENFIA.”
“‘We will defend the public nature of regional airports’” were the words of Alexis Tsipras in January 2015, while in April 2017, when he met at the Maximos Mansion with Fraport’s management—to whom the 14 regional airports had been transferred—he stated: “You are sending an important message with this investment of 1.234 billion euros; this is a significant moment for Greece.”
In the end, that blackboard at the Maximos Mansion took on a whole new dimension. It became the blacklist of the inconsistencies, mistakes, and misguided decisions of the SYRIZA-ANEL coalition government, where among the first names listed is that of Alexis Tsipras, as well as so many others who have already packed their bags for Amalias.
