In a post de profundis, Dimitra Halikia, former vice-president of OPEKEPE, highlights the “truth about the Greek Left of the last forty years”.
The Left of which she herself was a member, hence she knows from the inside what the causes of its collapse were, and what the role of Alexis Tsipras and Syriza, which she describes as a“tool” and believes that“today it is attempting as an ‘agent’ to appear as part of the solution to a damage of which it was the central manager”.
The post by Dimitra Halikia
The truth about the Greek Left of the last 40 years (outside of KKE), and of which I was a member all these years, has turned out to be so simple.
It didn’t fail because they fought it. It failed because it never decided what it wanted to be.
From the EAP and the Coalition to SYRIZA, it’s the same thing: shapes upon shapes, splits upon splits, “new beginnings” every few years.
Nor synthesis. No strategy. Only management of internal balances.
And then came Syriza. Not as a unified political project, but as a assemblage of all sorts of parties and splinters: some from the renewal left, some from the KKE, some from the extra-parliamentary, some from splits, some without any social reference.
What united them? In any case, not a common plan for the country. Cohesive “substance”? The “anti!” Anti-amnesty, anti-establishment rhetoric, easy slogans and moralizing without self-awareness.
And here is the crucial thing that some pretend not to see: How can there be a common project when the ideological contrasts are chaotic? When some talk about a break with Europe, others about “negotiation”, others about street mobilization, and others about institutional politics?
And somewhere in there the most convenient political narrative was discovered: “We don’t need ideological convergence. Programmatic is enough.” In the spoken word it sounds “serious”. But in practice? We don’t agree on anything profound, so let’s write a programmatic pamphlet to make it look like we agree. That is, the SYRIZA program for the government that lasted until the first crisis.
– in the third memorandum the “certainties” collapsed
– in the referendum the complete strategic confusion was revealed
– in governance it appeared that there was no common line
The programmatic “convergence” served as a political alibi not only for everyone to coexist without solving their differences, but to carry those differences into government.
And in the end, what happened? What always happens in these situations: the government was lost and the party was dominated by the strongest mechanism and the most flexible leader! The rest either went silent or left.
Let’s finally face the truth: programmatic convergence, without even the minimum common ideological convergence, is not a strategy. It is management of contradictions. And contradictions, sooner or later, pay off.
It was in this environment that Alexis Tsipras emerged and established himself.
For all these reasons, Tsipras was not the origin of the problem. He was the tool. Someone who “fit everyone” without solving anything! He was left to function as a leader because it suited the mechanisms. Everyone supported him while he was handing out power.
And when attrition came, he decided to take a “break”to bring in and support a man who lacked the words to be described both politically and socially. And then… they changed, because the former “leader” decided they needed to change!
Today we hear, even from cadres like Gavriel Sakellaridis, that Tsipras is the starting point of the Left’s credibility crisis.
I am sorry, but no, it is not. The crisis existed long before that.
Tsipras merely expressed it, exploited it, eventually made it into a government action and naturally failed.
The Greek left was not dismantled by one man.
It was dissolved by its own contradictions, which for years it hid under slogans.
This is, in my humble opinion, the real historical conclusion of the last four decades for the Greek Left: it has failed to build a serious, coherent and mature body of power. It has mainly managed to turn its internal disunity into successive “new beginnings”, until Syriza became the most successful and at the same time the most destructive of them. Successful electorally, disastrous politically. Because it took the sum total of the pathologies of the field and moved it to the centre of the political scene.
And Tsipras’ role today, present as an agent of reconstitution, pressure and possibly future repositioning. No longer as the unquestioned leader he was, but as the person around whom the illusions of an area that has solved neither its old nor its new problems still revolve.
Tsipras, then, is not the “starting point” of the crisis of the Greek Left. He is its most effective packaging! And today he tries as an “agent” to appear as part of the solution to a damage of which he has been the central manager, but not the sole creator.
So the real question for me is not what Tsipras will do.
The question is whether this room has finally figured out what has happened to it.
Speaking from the inside until a few months ago, I firmly believe that he hasn’t figured it out. So he will relive it and relive it again…
