Leaders of the new party of Alexis Tsipras<\/b> have been promoting yet another plan for social <\/b>justice<\/b> in recent days.<\/p>\n
They are promising hundreds of millions of euros<\/b> from taxing <\/b>luxury lifestyles. In the crosshairs are swimming pools<\/b>, expensive cars, and yachts.<\/b> It\u2019s the familiar recipe of the left<\/b>. When the numbers don\u2019t add up, there\u2019s always a rich person <\/b>who will foot the bill<\/b>.<\/p>\n
We\u2019ve seen this play out before. Recently in New York<\/b>, the socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani<\/b> promised free buses<\/b> for everyone. The slogan sounded good. Voters applauded it. But when it came time for implementation<\/b>, the costs<\/b>, institutional obstacles, and lack of funding<\/b> became apparent. The grand announcement was limited to pilot projects and fundraising efforts. Reality proved stronger than pre-election fantasy<\/b>.<\/p>\n
The Mamdani case is instructive<\/b>. It shows how easy <\/b>it is to hand out benefits from the podium of a campaign rally and how difficult it is to implement them <\/b>when the time comes to make decisions. Deficits <\/b>don\u2019t disappear with slogans, and government budgets <\/b>aren\u2019t balanced with wishful thinking. That is why announcements about taxing <\/b>the \u201crich<\/b>\u201d often sound more convincing before elections than after.<\/p>\n
Today\u2019s proposals by EL.A.S.<\/b> Taxing the \u201crich\u201d is once again presented as the magic solution that will fund benefits, free services, and social policies.<\/b> Except that the economy <\/b>doesn\u2019t operate on the basis of slogans<\/b>. And investments do not wait patiently to become the target of yet another campaign of class symbolism<\/b>. Those who readily promise revenue <\/b>from a handful of wealthy citizens usually discover that public finances<\/b> are much more complex.<\/p>\n
But there is also a second dimension.<\/b> The dimension of political memory. Because when you hear officials from Tsipras\u2019s party<\/b> promising tax raids <\/b>on yachts, it\u2019s impossible not to think of the most famous yacht <\/b>in post-dictatorship political history.<\/p>\n
The vacation <\/b>of the then-prime minister on the \u201cOdyssey<\/b>\u201d owned by the Panagopoulos<\/b> family, just a few days after the national tragedy<\/b> in Mati<\/b>, 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\u2019s historic line<\/b> in Parliament: \u201cThere he is, there he is, Tsipras the boatman.\u201d <\/b>A phrase that encapsulated in just a few words the gap between anti-capitalist rhetoric<\/b> and his ease in mingling with the economic elite.<\/p>\n
And here the irony becomes even greater. Alexis Tsipras chose to name the book <\/b>and the narrative of his political return \u201cIthaca<\/b>.\u201d He wanted to present himself as a modern-day Odysseus <\/b>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 \u201cOdyssey<\/b>\u201d and sailed the waters of the Ionian Sea.<\/p>\n
Perhaps, in the end, this is the real problem with the new announcements. It\u2019s not just that they bring to mind the utopias of Mamtani<\/b>. It\u2019s that they stumble over the very history of their inspiration. And when the politician known as \u201cthe yacht owner\u201d promises to tax yachts, the satire practically writes itself.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In recent days, officials from Alexis Tsipras\u2019s new party have been promoting yet another social justice plan. They are promising hundreds of …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12151,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12150"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12150\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/12151"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}