Amid the bad results for the Left in the European elections, the Greek outcome was particularly poignant. In the last such contest in 2014, Syriza rode the revolt against austerity to become the largest single party, in its final step toward national office. Five years later, in last month’s election, it finished ten points behind the right-wing New Democracy. And where once Syriza promised to spark change throughout the EU, it is now the best student of the neoliberal dogma “There Is No Alternative.”
After four years of slashed pensions, sell-offs of state assets, and even a right-wing turn on foreign policy, Syriza is now also set to lose office. Indeed, not only did Alexis Tsipras’s party enforce an even harsher austerity than its predecessors ever dreamt of, but as snap general elections loom, it is set to become an exhausted opposition to a sharply reactionary New Democracy government. Polls for the July 7 vote suggest the conservatives have a massive lead, and could even secure an absolute majority in parliament.
The hollowing out of Syriza’s base is the expression of disappointment and despair. But there are also signs that some of its voters are turning to left-wing alternatives. Former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis’s MeRA25 party achieved a particularly creditable result in the European contest, less than four hundred votes from electing a member of the European Parliament. As Greece heads to a fresh general election, MeRA25 hopes to elect its first members of parliament, offering a platform for its call to replace austerity with Europe-wide investment.
Jacobin’s David Broder spoke to Varoufakis about the effect of Syriza’s defeat on the wider European left, the prospects of a realignment of EU politics, and MeRA25’s own plans for a “political revolution” in Greece.
Almost all left-wing parties lost votes in the European elections, no matter what their strategy regarding the European Union (EU). For this reason, many analyses of the result have focused on more general obstacles, invoking the “death of the populist moment,” the stabilization of the EU, or indeed the lack of left-wing governments able to challenge its current policy balance. Such readings would all suggest a window of opportunity has closed. Do you think this is the case, or are there still openings?
It is stupendous that there is talk of a vote of confidence in the EU when the far right came first-placed in France, Britain, and Italy. Ten years ago, if you were told this would happen, you’d have said — oh my god. The mainstream media presenting the rise in liberal and Green parties as a vote of confidence in the EU is mind-boggling.
Politically and historically speaking, these parties’ rise is irrelevant. The liberals’ rise owes to Macron in France and Ciudadanos in Spain. These are deeply conservative forces — Ciudadanos even governs together with the far-right Vox in Andalusia. There is nothing liberal about them: they are traditional, austerian class warriors against the working class. Some such forces could be called more liberal, but only in the sense that the German CDU [Christian Democratic Union] is more liberal than the Austrian ÖVP [People’s Party]. This is just a shift within the same liberal-conservative bloc.
The same could be said of the Greens — and here we are really talking about France and Germany, where the Greens are a significant force. These parties are the green wing of social democracy, and their traditional government partners are the Parti Socialiste and SPD [Social Democratic Party], who collapsed due to their connivance in the assault on working-class voters. Indeed, overall the social-democratic/green blocs that led to the governments of François Hollande and Gerhard Schröder have shrunk.
To celebrate the rise of the Greens is to celebrate a lifestyle choice – fiscal conservatives who want to celebrate recycling and who say they like Greta Thunberg when addressing their kids. Indeed, in a debate with Sven Giegold, the German Greens’ leading candidate, in response to my presentation of DiEM25’s ambitious green investment plan of half a trillion euros annually funded via European Investment Bank bonds, I was appalled to hear him retort that there were not enough green projects to fund with so much money. He offered as proof for this the neoliberal creed that if there was such a need, the market would have provided the investments!
(...) Do you think left-wing voters have bought Tsipras’s message that Syriza made the best of a bad situation? Or have they lost faith in the prospect of changing things? And what are the chances of bringing these other forces together?
Ever since he surrendered to the troika, Tsipras was always going to invest in a dilemma put to progressives: “Who do you want to torture you — an enthusiastic torturer, or someone like me who doesn’t want to torture you but will do it to keep his job?” This was his line in September 2015 [in that year’s second general election, after Syriza caved to the troika]. But four years later, after pushing through the most naked, harshest austerity policies anywhere in Europe — including under Greece’s previous governments — he can no longer blackmail progressives with lesser-evil arguments. (...)
The regime did not feel threatened by parties advocating exit from the euro and EU. Our view — that we’re not going to leave, and it’s up for the German government to leave, or to throw us out — is harder for them to deal with. The regime despised us because we neither want Grexit nor fear it. Our call unilaterally to implement perfectly moderate policies without fear or passion destabilized them. It was a danger to their system because of its widespread appeal.
by Yanis Varoufakis, Jacobin | Read more:
Image: Sean Gallup / Getty
After four years of slashed pensions, sell-offs of state assets, and even a right-wing turn on foreign policy, Syriza is now also set to lose office. Indeed, not only did Alexis Tsipras’s party enforce an even harsher austerity than its predecessors ever dreamt of, but as snap general elections loom, it is set to become an exhausted opposition to a sharply reactionary New Democracy government. Polls for the July 7 vote suggest the conservatives have a massive lead, and could even secure an absolute majority in parliament.
The hollowing out of Syriza’s base is the expression of disappointment and despair. But there are also signs that some of its voters are turning to left-wing alternatives. Former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis’s MeRA25 party achieved a particularly creditable result in the European contest, less than four hundred votes from electing a member of the European Parliament. As Greece heads to a fresh general election, MeRA25 hopes to elect its first members of parliament, offering a platform for its call to replace austerity with Europe-wide investment.Jacobin’s David Broder spoke to Varoufakis about the effect of Syriza’s defeat on the wider European left, the prospects of a realignment of EU politics, and MeRA25’s own plans for a “political revolution” in Greece.
Almost all left-wing parties lost votes in the European elections, no matter what their strategy regarding the European Union (EU). For this reason, many analyses of the result have focused on more general obstacles, invoking the “death of the populist moment,” the stabilization of the EU, or indeed the lack of left-wing governments able to challenge its current policy balance. Such readings would all suggest a window of opportunity has closed. Do you think this is the case, or are there still openings?
YV - It is undoubtedly the case that a large window of opportunity has closed — and it was closed here, in Greece, in 2015. Millions of Europeans looked with hope to this country, and it was Alexis Tsipras’s Syriza government (elected that January) that had the responsibility for keeping that window open, and for opening it up further for others. What these millions wanted a break from was not even true neoliberalism, but what I would call bankruptocracy — a new regime in which the greatest power was wielded by the most bankrupt bankers.
Tsipras’s surrender in July 2015 closed that window of opportunity. And there’s no sugaring the bitter pill — the European elections were a complete catastrophe for progressives. Yet at the same time, we should also be clear that there is never a final victory or defeat. New windows are always opening up.
Yet if the troika’s treatment of Greece damaged the EU’s image, and also cast doubt on the prospect of a single state being able to change things, there is little sign of what other forces could challenge the present order. DiEM25 has spoken of constructing broad fronts across Europe, including even liberals and progressive-minded conservatives who see the need to break the EU out of its austerian dogmas. But do you see any evidence that other political forces are actually moving in the direction you suggest?
Firstly, I’ll say that the reason we lost the window of opportunity wasn’t the troika’s treatment of Greece. We shouldn’t blame our enemies for our defeats, just as we don’t blame the scorpion for stinging us — this is in its nature. The blame lies with those who decided to trade the anti-austerity agenda on which they were elected in exchange for a few years in office — all the while having their backs patted by the enemy.
As for the resonance of our arguments, there is an impressive disconnect between a general recognition that austerity was, indeed, a disaster, and the lack of any political program to end it. I have the privilege of speaking to a lot of bankers — for some reason, they like talking to me. They completely accept that socialism for bankers and austerity for the population brought about a major defeat for European capitalism. Social democrats on the ground admit that it has been terrible, as do some conservatives, as well as the Greens and the Left. But the disconnect lies in the lack of an organized political plan to shift us out of this.
Even progressives have failed to get together to advance an alternative — indeed, only DiEM25 put forward the plan for a Green New Deal. The Greens themselves are so conservative, so ordoliberal, and so scared that conservatives will accuse them of being fiscally irresponsible, that they end up recycling ordoliberalism.
But we don’t regret not standing together with the Party of the European Left, which has chosen incoherence. From Italy to Switzerland, Hungary or Britain, the fascists and right-wingers are coherent: they say, “we want our country back,” and that means dissolving supranational organizations and institutions and pointing the finger of blame at foreigners, whether that means Jews, Syrians, Greeks, Germans, or refugees — the “other.” It is a misanthropic dead end, but it is coherent.
That cannot be said of the Party of the European Left, which included not only Syriza — which completely surrendered to the troika — but also the europhile French Communist Party and allied euro-skeptic forces like Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Insoumise, or Podemos, whose policy on Europe and the euro is not to have a policy. (...)
This election saw not just the growth of the far right but also advances for liberal and Green parties, at the expense of social and Christian democrats. But if pro-European sentiment has been mobilized in opposition to right-wing populism, do you think this could be harnessed by the anti-neoliberal left? Wasn’t the rise in support for these parties instead more of a vote of confidence in the EU as it currently exists?
Tsipras’s surrender in July 2015 closed that window of opportunity. And there’s no sugaring the bitter pill — the European elections were a complete catastrophe for progressives. Yet at the same time, we should also be clear that there is never a final victory or defeat. New windows are always opening up.
Yet if the troika’s treatment of Greece damaged the EU’s image, and also cast doubt on the prospect of a single state being able to change things, there is little sign of what other forces could challenge the present order. DiEM25 has spoken of constructing broad fronts across Europe, including even liberals and progressive-minded conservatives who see the need to break the EU out of its austerian dogmas. But do you see any evidence that other political forces are actually moving in the direction you suggest?
Firstly, I’ll say that the reason we lost the window of opportunity wasn’t the troika’s treatment of Greece. We shouldn’t blame our enemies for our defeats, just as we don’t blame the scorpion for stinging us — this is in its nature. The blame lies with those who decided to trade the anti-austerity agenda on which they were elected in exchange for a few years in office — all the while having their backs patted by the enemy.
As for the resonance of our arguments, there is an impressive disconnect between a general recognition that austerity was, indeed, a disaster, and the lack of any political program to end it. I have the privilege of speaking to a lot of bankers — for some reason, they like talking to me. They completely accept that socialism for bankers and austerity for the population brought about a major defeat for European capitalism. Social democrats on the ground admit that it has been terrible, as do some conservatives, as well as the Greens and the Left. But the disconnect lies in the lack of an organized political plan to shift us out of this.
Even progressives have failed to get together to advance an alternative — indeed, only DiEM25 put forward the plan for a Green New Deal. The Greens themselves are so conservative, so ordoliberal, and so scared that conservatives will accuse them of being fiscally irresponsible, that they end up recycling ordoliberalism.
But we don’t regret not standing together with the Party of the European Left, which has chosen incoherence. From Italy to Switzerland, Hungary or Britain, the fascists and right-wingers are coherent: they say, “we want our country back,” and that means dissolving supranational organizations and institutions and pointing the finger of blame at foreigners, whether that means Jews, Syrians, Greeks, Germans, or refugees — the “other.” It is a misanthropic dead end, but it is coherent.
That cannot be said of the Party of the European Left, which included not only Syriza — which completely surrendered to the troika — but also the europhile French Communist Party and allied euro-skeptic forces like Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Insoumise, or Podemos, whose policy on Europe and the euro is not to have a policy. (...)
This election saw not just the growth of the far right but also advances for liberal and Green parties, at the expense of social and Christian democrats. But if pro-European sentiment has been mobilized in opposition to right-wing populism, do you think this could be harnessed by the anti-neoliberal left? Wasn’t the rise in support for these parties instead more of a vote of confidence in the EU as it currently exists?
It is stupendous that there is talk of a vote of confidence in the EU when the far right came first-placed in France, Britain, and Italy. Ten years ago, if you were told this would happen, you’d have said — oh my god. The mainstream media presenting the rise in liberal and Green parties as a vote of confidence in the EU is mind-boggling.
Politically and historically speaking, these parties’ rise is irrelevant. The liberals’ rise owes to Macron in France and Ciudadanos in Spain. These are deeply conservative forces — Ciudadanos even governs together with the far-right Vox in Andalusia. There is nothing liberal about them: they are traditional, austerian class warriors against the working class. Some such forces could be called more liberal, but only in the sense that the German CDU [Christian Democratic Union] is more liberal than the Austrian ÖVP [People’s Party]. This is just a shift within the same liberal-conservative bloc.
The same could be said of the Greens — and here we are really talking about France and Germany, where the Greens are a significant force. These parties are the green wing of social democracy, and their traditional government partners are the Parti Socialiste and SPD [Social Democratic Party], who collapsed due to their connivance in the assault on working-class voters. Indeed, overall the social-democratic/green blocs that led to the governments of François Hollande and Gerhard Schröder have shrunk.
To celebrate the rise of the Greens is to celebrate a lifestyle choice – fiscal conservatives who want to celebrate recycling and who say they like Greta Thunberg when addressing their kids. Indeed, in a debate with Sven Giegold, the German Greens’ leading candidate, in response to my presentation of DiEM25’s ambitious green investment plan of half a trillion euros annually funded via European Investment Bank bonds, I was appalled to hear him retort that there were not enough green projects to fund with so much money. He offered as proof for this the neoliberal creed that if there was such a need, the market would have provided the investments!
(...) Do you think left-wing voters have bought Tsipras’s message that Syriza made the best of a bad situation? Or have they lost faith in the prospect of changing things? And what are the chances of bringing these other forces together?
Ever since he surrendered to the troika, Tsipras was always going to invest in a dilemma put to progressives: “Who do you want to torture you — an enthusiastic torturer, or someone like me who doesn’t want to torture you but will do it to keep his job?” This was his line in September 2015 [in that year’s second general election, after Syriza caved to the troika]. But four years later, after pushing through the most naked, harshest austerity policies anywhere in Europe — including under Greece’s previous governments — he can no longer blackmail progressives with lesser-evil arguments. (...)
The regime did not feel threatened by parties advocating exit from the euro and EU. Our view — that we’re not going to leave, and it’s up for the German government to leave, or to throw us out — is harder for them to deal with. The regime despised us because we neither want Grexit nor fear it. Our call unilaterally to implement perfectly moderate policies without fear or passion destabilized them. It was a danger to their system because of its widespread appeal.
Image: Sean Gallup / Getty
