The Syriza Wave: Surging and Crashing with the Greek Left

Opendemocracy, 2021

SYRIZA is not the same party that rose to power in 2015 – is this the end of its populist adventure?

International Socialist Review, 2017

SYRIZA was formed in 2004 as a fairly loose coalition, involving several different left currents and political groups, but soon emerged as an assertive left pole in the central political scene and the Greek parliament. SYRIZA’s pre-electoral program promised an end to austerity policies and a deal with the country’s creditors to fund the Greek public sector; a few weeks after SYRIZA’s rise to power, those promises gave way to negotiations for a milder austerity Memorandum, which finally led to the adaption to the European neo-liberal framework. After two electoral victories, SYRIZA remains dominant on the Greek political scene, but today the party is better understood as a mainstream social democratic party, than as a movement of the radical Left.

Syriza is the only radical Left party to be elected a national governing party since the worldwide economic crisis began in 2008. In this interview with political theorist Michalis Spourdalakis, a founding member of Syriza, we discuss the unique strategic relationships between social movements and the new radical Left parties such as Syriza, the struggle to maintain the party’s independence amid co-optation into the Greek state and broader European Institutions, and what the Syriza experience can teach us about attempts to transform capitalist states.

Dissent, pp. 33-37, fall, 2013

Irish Marxist Review, 2017

In this article we approach SYRIZA's electoral success between 2012 and 2015 as a movement effect. We focus on SYRIZA's features, strategy and message that have been developed on the grounds of its movement activity, as well as the external political conditions which SYRIZA seems to take advantage of. We argue that the anti-austerity campaign created the necessary preconditions for the electoral and political rise of SYRIZA, namely the emergence of a new political boundary between pro- and anti-Memorandum forces and a subsequent majoritarian socio-political category that could be transformed into a privileged electoral pool for SYRIZA.

This paper examines the shifts in the policies of the Greek Left, focusing on the “SYRIZA Phenomenon”, on the basis of a Marxist approach to (European) capitalism, relations of class representation and the historical tradition of Greek Left.