The Syriza phenomenon

Since Syriza’s victory in the legislative elections on January 25, all of Europe has been watching the first steps of Alexis Tsipras and his government. A look back with the historian Anastassios Anastassiadis on the origins of a movement which, in the face of emergency, mobilizes the memory of the Second World War.

Anastassios Anastassiadis is assistant professor of Greek history at McGill University in Montreal. Author of a thesis defended in 2006 in Paris, he is particularly interested in the formation of the modern Greek State in XIXe century, by combining the methods and concepts of history, sociology and political science. His work focuses in particular on the relationships between tradition ” And “ modernity », on cultural transfers between Western Europe and Mediterranean Europe, or on the role of the Church and euergetism in Greek society of XIXe century. The historian, who has already reported for the Life of ideas the history of the Greek State, looks back here at the recent elections and answers the following questions:

1) Does Syriza’s victory herald a lasting restructuring of the Greek political system? ?

2) What is the history of this party and these activists ?

3) Doesn’t the alliance with the independent Greeks confuse its message? ?

4) Why is the memory of the Second World War so present in his speeches ?

5) Does Greece have a separate status in the European imagination? ?

Comments collected by Nicolas Delalande. Shooting and editing: A. Suhamy.

Interview transcript

Books & Ideas: Does Syriza’s victory herald a lasting restructuring of the Greek political system? ?

Anastassios Anastassiadis: You should know that since the restoration of democracy in 1974, after the dictatorship of the colonels, the Greek political system had been dominated by two political parties: the New Democracy, center-right and pro-European, and the PASOKthe socialist party, which ended up adapting to the European Union. These two parties combined almost eighty percent of the electorate until very recently. Since 2009 and the crisis, this bipartisanship has collapsed: the PASOK for example, lost forty percent of its electorate in five years. Thus, out of the three hundred Greek deputies in parliament, two hundred and twenty deputies had either never had a mandate or had less than three years of parliamentary experience.


Books & Ideas: What is the history of this party and these activists? ?


Anastassios Anastassiadis: Syriza obtained thirty-six percent of the vote in the last elections, while in 2009 it obtained only four percent. Syriza is a party resulting from several splits and recompositions of the Greek communist left. The first split took place in 1968 during the dictatorship, when the Communist Party split into a pro-European party and a Stalinist party. The second recomposition took place in the years 1989-1991, following the events of 1989 and after an attempt to reunite the two branches of the Communist Party. This attempted reunion ultimately resulted in another split in 1991.

Syriza is a coalition that brings together people from these splits, notably those opposed to the Stalinist tendency of the Greek Communist Party, as well as various ecological and leftist associations. Between 1991 and 2009, Syriza fluctuated between three and four percent in votes. However, due to the crisis and the impoverishment of the middle classes who have moved away from PASOKits ranks have grown significantly.


Books & Ideas: Doesn’t the alliance with the independent Greeks confuse the message? ?

Anastassios Anastassiadis: Whether we like Syriza or not, we must recognize that tactically speaking, Syriza played very well. There was absolutely a need for government continuity so that Greece could continue to negotiate with Europeans. From the evening of the election, Tsipras knew that he did not have an absolute majority. But this would have had a double consequence. First the next day, Monday morning, Greece would have found itself without a government: this would have caused a crisis of uncertainty, a panic, both at the level of the financial markets and at the political level. This would have justified the speeches of the Greek right which asserted that a Syriza victory would amount to political and economic chaos. Thus, by making this alliance with independent Greeks, Syriza could calm tempers, both inside and outside Greece. Then, there is an important institutional aspect: if Syriza had not been able to form a coalition, then the president would have been obliged to hand over the mandate to form a government to the second party, New Democracy, which would not be there. not reached, then to the third party, Golden Dawn, the majority of whose leaders are in prison !

Many people have wondered why Tsipras chose this party as a partner, which is xenephobic and anti-Semitic. This question can be answered in the following way. Tsipras’ first mission is to renegotiate the memorandum that links Greece to the Troika, that is to say the European Union, the European Central Bank and the IMF. But the only party frequentable » – so not Golden Dawn – which also had in its program the renegotiation of this memorandum, it was the independent Greeks. It is clear that after the renegotiation, this government will not be able to continue since everything opposes these two parties. There will surely be other elections this year, or even before the end of the summer.

Books & Ideas: Why is the memory of the Second World War so present in his speeches ?

Anastassios Anastassiadis: Indeed, over the last five years we have observed a revival of the memory of the Second World War. In Greece we do not celebrate the end of the Second World War since the civil war immediately followed (1946-1949). Over the last fifty years, the civil war has left its mark on Greek collective memory. Since 1989 we had tried to erase this memory of the Greek civil war by advocating reconciliation between right and left and by destroying the archives of internal security, by a government already at the time of right and left.

What is new is this return to the Second World War. It was a very harsh occupation on the part of the Germans. Greece was not entitled to reparations like other countries, due to the fact that it was in a civil war, and then because in 1953 it accepted the German debt restructuring agreement. Syriza’s use of this issue of reparations is both clever and problematic. Clever because Tsipras reminds Europeans that Greece at the time accepted the cancellation of the German debt, and to compare with the way Greece is treated today. This is part of Tsipras’ desire to propose a European New Deal: a new “ Marshall Plan “, a kind of “ Merkel Plan “.

The perverse effect of this argument is that in recent years we have seen representations of Germany in the guise of Nazi Germany flourish. This favored the trivialization of Nazism, particularly with the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn movement. Tsipras attempted to redress the situation when he laid a wreath at the monuments to communist resistance fighters shot by the Nazis.

Books & Ideas: Does Greece have a special status in the European imagination? ?

Anastassios Anastassiadis: In a way, the European Union has tied its own hands in terms of negotiations and its imagination. By presenting Greece as the cradle of European civilization we are, in fact, obliged to take this ideological argument seriously. We often hear this argument: we cannot do without this country. German public opinion is overwhelmingly opposed to Greece’s exit from Europe. Today Syriza is riding the return of a certain philhellenism, already there in 1946 at the time of the Greek civil war when Greece was the symbol of resistance to communism. Syriza, paradoxically enough, benefits from this philhellenism. History also teaches us that phases of philhellenism have very often been followed by phases “ mishellenism » acute, where the same people could go from great love to great hatred.