The Rise and Fall of Greece’s Radical-in-Name-Only Syriza Party
On January 25, 2015, Greece’s left-wing party Syriza , which subscribed to no particular ideology but ran an election campaign that vowed to end the sadistic austerity measures that had been imposed on Greece by its international creditors, shred the bailout agreements into pieces, write off a big chuck of the debt, and create jobs for hundreds of thousands of unemployed, won the legislative elections by taking 36% of the popular vote.
The scale of Syriza’s defeat in the parliamentary elections of May 21 may signify the end of the road for the party of Alexis Tsipras. The party’s demise has in fact been underway from the very first weeks that Tsipras took office as Greece’s prime minister. Lack of experience in governance, ideological confusion, severe structural constraints, but also crude political opportunism and broken promises pretty much guaranteed that Syriza’s downfall was just a matter of time.
More than 40 Syriza MP’s spoke against the new measures, and half of Syriza’s central committee sided against the new agreement. But none of this mattered. Syriza had very weak democratic structures, no real links with the Greek working-class, and Tsipras had total authority over party decisions as most policy issues were decided in unofficial meetings with people close to the “great leader.
Big capital and the middles classes have been the main beneficiaries of Mitsotakis’ efforts to rejuvenate the Greek economy. Because of the pandemic, Greece’s gross domestic product contracted by 9% in 2020, but grew by 8.43% in 2021 and by 5.91% in 2022. Tourism contributed greatly to the strong rebound in GDP, and the economic prosperity of Greece remains strongly tied to the development of tourism.
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