Leaders of the new party of Alexis Tsipras have been promoting yet another plan for social justice in recent days.
They are promising hundreds of millions of euros from taxing luxury lifestyles. In the crosshairs are swimming pools, expensive cars, and yachts. It’s the familiar recipe of the left. When the numbers don’t add up, there’s always a rich person who will foot the bill.
We’ve seen this play out before. Recently in New York, the socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani promised free buses for everyone. The slogan sounded good. Voters applauded it. But when it came time for implementation, the costs, institutional obstacles, and lack of funding became apparent. The grand announcement was limited to pilot projects and fundraising efforts. Reality proved stronger than pre-election fantasy.
The Mamdani case is instructive. It shows how easy it is to hand out benefits from the podium of a campaign rally and how difficult it is to implement them when the time comes to make decisions. Deficits don’t disappear with slogans, and government budgets aren’t balanced with wishful thinking. That is why announcements about taxing the “rich” often sound more convincing before elections than after.
Today’s proposals by EL.A.S. Taxing the “rich” is once again presented as the magic solution that will fund benefits, free services, and social policies. Except that the economy doesn’t operate on the basis of slogans. And investments do not wait patiently to become the target of yet another campaign of class symbolism. Those who readily promise revenue from a handful of wealthy citizens usually discover that public finances are much more complex.
But there is also a second dimension. The dimension of political memory. Because when you hear officials from Tsipras’s party promising tax raids on yachts, it’s impossible not to think of the most famous yacht in post-dictatorship political history.
The vacation of the then-prime minister on the “Odyssey” owned by the Panagopoulos family, just a few days after the national tragedy in Mati, were not merely a public relations blunder. They became a symbol of a contradiction that has followed him to this day. A symbol so powerful that it gave rise to Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s historic line in Parliament: “There he is, there he is, Tsipras the boatman.” A phrase that encapsulated in just a few words the gap between anti-capitalist rhetoric and his ease in mingling with the economic elite.
And here the irony becomes even greater. Alexis Tsipras chose to name the book and the narrative of his political return “Ithaca.” He wanted to present himself as a modern-day Odysseus who has completed his wanderings and is returning to embark on a new political journey. Except that the Odyssey always precedes Ithaca. And in his case, the Odyssey already had a name. It was called “Odyssey” and sailed the waters of the Ionian Sea.
Perhaps, in the end, this is the real problem with the new announcements. It’s not just that they bring to mind the utopias of Mamtani. It’s that they stumble over the very history of their inspiration. And when the politician known as “the yacht owner” promises to tax yachts, the satire practically writes itself.
