If Syriza triumphs in the Greek election, it won’t be because of nostalgia for the bad old days, but a desire for reform
By Maria Margaronis, Guardian
The posters on Athenian bus shelters look like windows to another world: bright colours glimpsed through cut-out letters that read “Hope is coming”. People walk past grey-faced, hunched, caught up in their own trouble.
For Europe, the almost certain victory of the leftwing party Syriza in Sunday’s Greek election will be a historic moment: the first real democratic challenge to the politics of austerity, a test case for Europe’s future. There are occasions when it feels like that here too. At Alexis Tsipras’s final election rally in Athens on Thursday night, under floodlights so bright you almost needed shades, the crowd roared ecstatically when the Spanish Podemos leader, Pablo Iglesias, bounded on to the stage and said, in perfect Greek: “A wind of democratic change is blowing in Europe, and in Greece its name is Syriza.” “Syriza, Podemos, venceremos,” we chanted back at him; a man beside me waved the red, yellow and purple flag of the Spanish republic.
The forces that have brought Syriza to the brink of power originated in Europe, in Brussels and Berlin; the result will send ripples right back to the centre. But all politics is local, and the battlefield is here, in neighbourhoods full of closed shops and empty houses, in streets where there’s barely a glance for the army of souls who just can’t make it any more: the mutterers and murmurers, the addicts and rough sleepers, old men with sunken cheeks. People scrape shreds of hope together like coins. “It’s not that people have hope,” an organiser with a Syriza community project told me. “It’s that they hope to have hope.”
The devastation wreaked on Greece by the disastrous experiment of austerity is the soil in which Syriza grew. A large part of the population feel as if they are standing on the edge of a cliff. Whatever happens next, they say, even if Europe cuts us off, it can’t get worse than this. Burned before by politicians promising the earth, and steeped in the grey reality around them, they are not expecting miracles, or even all that much. But they’ve reached the end of the road, and they are ravenous for something new.
Yet that’s not the only thing that explains Syriza’s rise. Over the past five years, Greece has begun to change, and Syriza has changed with it. In the early months of the crisis, you were either against the troika or in the “reformist” camp, which meant you were signed up to the neoliberal agenda of Greece’s creditors. Now the party that rallied the crowds by railing against the troika has also turned its attention to what’s rotten at home. Syriza has reclaimed the idea of reform for the left, reframing it in terms of a fair, egalitarian welfare state.
It has also promised what may be the most essential and most difficult thing: to end high-level corruption and cut the apron strings that bind Greece’s political parties with the banks and media emperors. “Even if we could, we don’t want to go back to 2009,” Tsipras said on Thursday. “We need you behind us to put an end to corruption, tax evasion, bribes and clientelist politics.”
It’s this, as well as the economic collapse of the middle class, that helps explain the steady haemorrhage of votes from conservative New Democracy to Syriza. Olga Drongiti has worked for 30 years as a health visitor in the suburb of Ayia Paraskevi. She has voted New Democracy all her life, but this time she’s voting left. “I want dignity, I want meritocracy,” she told me. “I’ve had enough of people being promoted over me because they’ve slipped someone a bribe. And no, I don’t care if they throw me out of the euro. We’ve lost our joy, our laughter here, we’ve fallen into depression.”
The received wisdom abroad has been that Syriza represents a return to the bad old days of cronyism, featherbedding and political favours. Lately Tsipras has made a point of insisting that he’ll end such practices. That won’t be easy – it means a deep change in the culture – but more and more people talk as if they are ready for it. “If Syriza doesn’t send the first person who tries to bribe them, even for a single euro, straight to the prosecutor, we’re finished,” says Kyrios Dimitris, 71, who runs an efficient food bank in working-class Nea Ionia.
“Don’t go back on what you’ve said or we’ll crush you with our own hands,” a grey-haired man in Ayia Paraskevi growls at a Syriza candidate, practically seizing him by the lapels.
Perhaps more than relief from poverty, more even than dignity, people are thirsty for justice – as well as its more bare-knuckled cousin, punishment. There is a deep disgust – a hatred, even – for those who brought Greece to this point, who sold the country out to line their pockets. That too has fed Syriza, and will have to be channelled through a reformed judiciary that’s both impartial and fair.
That’s only one of the many (almost) impossible things that will have to be done before breakfast by a Syriza government. But there is no alternative. In the five years of deep crisis, with false starts and mistakes, divisions and diversions, the Greek left has managed to push back the threat of fascism, to build self-help networks for a broken society, to sketch a new political narrative for Greece and for Europe, and to create a modern party that’s about to win an election. All politics is local, but solidarity has no borders. In the tough negotiations ahead, Greece will need the support of its neighbours, politicians and citizens as it pushes for debt relief, an end to austerity and a different future for Europe.
