New democracy doesn’t deserve its victory, but syriza deserves its defeat | thearticle

The Greek election results are in. New Democracy has stormed to victory with almost 40 per cent of the vote, beating the Syriza government by a wide margin. Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras

will be replaced by Kyriakos Mitsotakis, a former banker from one of the country’s most powerful and politically connected families. An insurgent leftist movement has been ousted by the

Greek old guard – the cronyists and careerists whose previous stint in office caused a protracted economic crisis.  It is a sad day for anyone who hoped that Syriza would use its 2015

mandate to confront the Troika, negotiate a pro-growth bailout package and reverse New Democracy’s recession. It is even sadder for those who retained this hope after Tsipras capitulated to

the EU and IMF, agreeing to forfeit his manifesto pledges and implement punishing austerity in exchange for an emergency loan. For progressives who continued to support Syriza after this

shameful U-turn, the logic was as follows: Tsipras had either to leave the EU or accept the creditors’ terms; he chose the latter because its impact would be less disastrous, and now he must

adopt neoliberal policies that he detests; but he will nonetheless protect the most vulnerable citizens from these reforms and resuscitate his socialist principles once Greece has regained

its fiscal independence. That dream is now dead. Mitsotakis is set to zealously enforce the policies which Tsipras reluctantly embraced. He will sell off public services to private

investors, dismantle regulations and cut the corporate tax rate. Entrenched poverty and endemic unemployment will continue, and conditions will inevitably worsen for Greece’s growing refugee

population. Given this state of affairs, it will become easier to idealise Syriza, or pretend that their policies would have set Greece on a more felicitous trajectory. Some will recast

their coalition as a noble enterprise that tried to deliver change in the least allowing circumstances. But this is a fantasy to which no principled leftist can yield.  The dominant features

of Syriza’s governance were spinelessness and betrayal. When 61 per cent of Greeks voted to reject the creditors’ terms in a national plebiscite, Syriza did not seize this opportunity to

confront the EU, and instead signed up to a worse deal than that which the electorate rebuffed. This forced the resignation of finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, whose viable alternative

plan – to create a parallel banking system for Greece – was deemed too radical by Tsipras.  After the bailout was agreed, Tsipras did everything he could to ensure that Greek banks would not

have to pay for the crisis. He complied with their recapitalisation requests at enormous cost to the taxpayer and facilitated their clearance of ‘bad loans’ – a process which involved the

mass repossession of houses, along with the sale of non-performing loans to vulture funds. Grassroots efforts to block these repossessions through nonviolent civil disobedience have been met

with shocking aggression by state forces, who have arrested scores of left-wing activists. Opposition politicians have faced criminal prosecution for their involvement with these protests,

and the Greek Security Services have undertaken extensive surveillance operations on former Syriza members.  Syriza-backed repossessions continue to exacerbate the country’s homelessness

problem. Yet Tsipras is determined to destroy the last remaining safety net for rough sleepers: Greece’s squats and communes. In the run up to the last election, his government raided

housing co-ops across the country, expelling residents and arresting organisers. The longstanding tacit agreement between Greek anarchists and the state – that the former’s peaceful,

inclusive communities would preserve their autonomy – has been violated by Syriza, who ramped up their repression to court right-wing voters.  On top of this, Tsipras has accepted every

additional austerity measure which his creditors have requested. His country will be forced to meet punitive fiscal targets long after the bailout agreement has finished; it will be

supervised by its Troika overlords until at least 2060; and it will continue the discount sale of public assets which Tsipras initiated by giving up ‘ports, airports, sea-shores, railways,

electricity, water and gas companies, archaeological and cultural sites, theatres, court-houses, goldmines and other profitable enterprises’ (as Zoe Konstantopoulou has documented).  This

shameful handling of domestic policy is matched only by Tsipras’s approach to international relations. A party which once said that NATO ‘has no reason to exist’ now wears its membership

with pride. The Syriza government spent billions on American fighter jets, cosied up to Trump and Netanyahu, sold weapons to the criminal regime in Saudi Arabia, and sanctioned NATO’s

eastward expansion.  New Democracy will no doubt aggravate this decline into jingoism, and perpetuate state violence against anyone who opposes its economic agenda. Mitsotakis is an extreme

neoliberal who by no means deserves his victory. But if one thing is clear from Tsipras’s record, it’s that the outgoing prime minister deserves his defeat.