Tsipras won't get everything he wants but probably enough to paint it as a victory for beleaguered Greeks
Seven long years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the doctrine of austerity that has held sway in Europe since the crash has been conclusively rejected by a major European electorate.
There had already been false dawns: the election of Francois Hollande in France in 2012 was supposed to signal to Brussels that austerity wasn’t working. Riding a wave of anti-austerity sentiment, the new President promised to squeeze the rich and invigorate the French economy with Keynsian stimulus.
And yet the French election of 2012 wasn’t to be the transformative turning point it was initially billed as. Soon after taking office Hollande rowed back on many of his pre-election pledges and embarked on his own programme of cuts. It was the anti-austerity revolution betrayed once more.
But the election of Syriza in Greece feels different, not least because the country has suffered far greater hardship from austerity. Since the onset of the recession in 2008, Greece has lost around a quarter of its economic output and 26 per cent of the country’s labour force are unemployed, according to government figures.
This, supposedly, was the price ordinary Greeks were meant to pay for the Troika’s (the European Union, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank) 2010 bailout of Greek banks; the Greek government was granted €240bn but strictly on the condition that it implemented a brutal austerity programme.
The election of Syriza over the weekend means that, for the time being at least, that ship has sailed.
Already the continent’s austerity hawks are circling Greece with dire warnings of impending chaos and penury. David Cameron this morning tweeted that the “Greek election will increase economic uncertainty across Europe”. Meanwhile Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann said he hoped “the new Greek government will not make promises it cannot keep and the country cannot afford”.
Right-wing political leaders sound worried and they ought to be: Greek voters have categorically rejected a key plank of the eurozone policy for dealing with the fallout from the financial crisis: cuts, cuts and more cuts.
This poses two big questions: how will German Chancellor Angela Merkel respond? And how will European centre-left parties react to the election of a radical anti-austerity party?
The new Greek government must come to some agreement with the ECB by 28 February, which is when the current deal with the Troika runs out. Should this fail to happen, Greek’s deal with the ECB will officially come to an end, triggering a run on Greek banks. The ECB could then offer to recapitalise the banks but with enormous strings attached – think neo-liberal reforms and further austerity.
However the size of Syriza’s victory (and the message it sends to European elites) means that the sensible money is probably on party leader Alexis Tsipras successfully renegotiating the 2010 bailout terms with Brussels. Tsipras won’t get everything his party wants from the ECB but will probably get enough to paint it as a victory for beleaguered Greeks. With an eye on polls showing that 70 per cent of his countrymen want to stay in the Euro, the Syriza leader won’t want to be the one who takes country back to the Drachma.
As such, expect Greece to stay in the Euro but the unity of Syriza to be short-lived: any compromise with the ECB will invariably be painted as a ‘betrayal’ by the party’s hard-left.
A compromise is made more likely by the fact that, while Merkel and the ECB won’t want Greece to leave the Eurozone, ‘Grexit’ would not be the unmitigated disaster for the rest of Europe it once might have been. Since the dark days of 2010 bank restructurings and ECB liquidity have significantly reduced the risk of potential Europe-wide contagion, meaning that Grexit would be a challenge for Europe rather than a disaster. The hand of Greece’s creditors is therefore strengthened.
The other big question is how European leaders of the centre-left react to the emergence of Syriza as Greece’s largest party. Will Tsipras’s victory provide Hollande in France and Matteo Renzi in Italy with an opportunity to push back against Brussels and Berlin-backed budgetary constraints? Combined with ECB president Mario Draghi’s intervention last week, does Syriza’s triumph further isolate the hawkish Merkel?
It ought at the very least to give the left a stronger hand when arguing the toss with Merkel over the best way to reinvigorate economies that are still feeling the pain from the 2008 crash.
James Bloodworth is the editor of Left Foot Forward. Follow him on Twitter
55 Responses to “Syriza: The Greek left has triumphed. So what next?”
AlanMacDonald
Greece is the birthplace of democracy and America is the new world birthplace of democratic revolution against EMPIRE — we are brothers in solidarity.
From a far broader (and far more important) perspective, “Syriza’s Historic Win Puts All People On Collision Course with EMPIRE” — and that will lead to real progress for the first time since this Disguised Global Capitalist EMPIRE has taken over the US as its nominal global HQ.
This Disguised Global Capitalist Empire, this ‘Empire of Chaos’ (as Pepe Escobar calls it), this ‘Empire of the Global Elite’ (who control all looted and horded wealth and nearly all governments), and this highly integrated (but well hidden) six-sectored; corporate, financial, militarist, media/propaganda, extra-legal, and dual-party Vichy-political facade only ‘posing’ as our former country has taken-over, ‘captured’, and now almost fully “Occupies” the super-power formerly known as America (along with many developed capitalist aligned imperialist countries and transnational corporations, banks, and organizations), and which Empire much more effectively, guilefully, and deceitfully ‘disguises’ itself than Hitler’s earlier (and mere wannabe European) Nazi Empire tried to disguise itself in Vichy France during the Second World War (of empires), is for the first time since the attempted counter-culture revolution of the 60’s (which was crushed by the Empire) about to encounter the re-igniting of a sizable left/progressive revolution right within part of the Empire — right within the European sector of the Empire HQed in our country.
Not only other northern and central European ‘subjects’ of the Empire, who as ‘subjects’ and ‘subjected’ to austerity by the Empire, but even the dulled-down, deluded, and propagandized American ‘subjects’ of the austerity, wars, looting, spying, tyranny, environmental torture, and multiple other CRIMES of this Disguised Global Capitalist EMPIRE are being urged to support our Greek compatriots —- as other American colonial ‘subjects’ of the British EMPIRE supported their fellow revolutionaries in Concord and Lexington Massachusetts.
We American ‘subjects’ of this newer and far better Disguised Global Capitalist EMPIRE almost 250 years later need to TAKE THE LEAD in Revolting against the Global Elite Empire which is so clearly and universally oppressing all the people of the world as ‘subjects’ rather than citizens of a New World Order of EMPIRE (a New World Empire) — of austerity, of wars, of deceit, of spying, of oppression, of tyranny, and inexorable serfdom if we don’t act together and in solidarity with all similarly oppressed people of our world.
Perhaps, and hopefully (unlike Obama’s false hope for change), we can all be inspired and enlightened by the first European people —- since we have not been by the brave patriots of the Arab Spring —- to finally realize that, “First the Empire came for the Egyptian revolutionaries, but we were not Egyptian, then the Global Empire came for the Libyan revolutionaries, but we were not Libyan, but now the Disguised Global Capitalist Empire is coming for Europeans” (and soon American ‘subjects’) —- and then it will be too late.
Perhaps 2015 will be the start of a new “Revolutionary Summer” in America?
“The British ministry and the Continental Congress were, in fact, looking at the crisis from different ends of the same telescope in ways that accurately reflected their contrasting political assumptions. The British approach was decisively imperial, top down from George III, through Lord Germain, to all those converging ships and men. The American approach was decidedly republican, bottom up, dependent upon broad-based popular consent from that enigmatic entity called “the people.”
To repeat, nothing so sweepingly democratic had ever been attempted before, for the quite sound reason that a poll of the people was almost assured to produce a muffled or divided response or, worse, a chaotic cacophony.
What seems most historically significant, at least in retrospect, is how true each side was to the core values it claimed to be fighting for. It was the coercive power of an EMPIRE against the consensual potency of a fledgling (democratic) republic. History seldom provides pure embodiments of such contrasting political alternatives, but in the summer of 1776 they were both on display” [caps added]
Ellis, Joseph J. (2013-06-04). Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence (pp. 49-50). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
More than anything else, at least a core vanguard of Americans must focus like a laser on understanding, diagnosing, educating people, and ‘exposing’ the Disguised nature of this Global Capitalist Empire disease – this cancerous tumor that mus be non-violently ‘excised’ from our body politic and our world:
For as Zygmunt Bauman hauntingly puts it, “In the case of an ailing social order, the absence of an adequate diagnosis…is a crucial, perhaps decisive, part of the disease.”13
Berman, Morris (2011-02-07). Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire (p. 22). Norton. Kindle Edition.
“The U.S. state is a key point of condensation for pressures from dominant groups around the world to resolve problems of global capitalism and to secure the legitimacy of the system overall. In this regard, “U.S.” imperialism refers to the use by transnational elites of the U.S. state apparatus to continue to attempt to expand, defend, and stabilize the global capitalist system. We are witness less to a “U.S.” imperialism per se than to a global capitalist imperialism. We face an EMPIRE of global capital, headquartered, for evident historical reasons, in Washington.” [caps added]
Robinson, William I. (2014-07-31). Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity (p. 122). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.
ForeignRedTory
What for? Merckel’s stance throughout the entire episoe has been the same, she got re-elected WITH that stance, and that settles the matter.
Greece did contract debts in Euros, and Greece will just have to pay them back in Euros. No amount of whining about Drachmas and Grexits will alter that simple fact.
ForeignRedTory
Why, exactly, is negotiatig with Trotters preferable over negotiating with Fascists? They are both vermin.
ForeignRedTory
Balls. What got the Greeks into the mess is a failure to stick to rigid economical orthodoxy in the first place, by borrowing too much, by cooking the books, and of course by insufficient rigidity in taxation.
ForeignRedTory
What exactly is supposed to be immoral about it?
The debts are contracted collectively and the liability is collectively. There is no more need to permit individual cop-outs. Perhaps Corporations also get individual cop-outs?
Libertarianism just leads to Ayn Rand.