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Posted by kasama on June 17, 2012
Here s a piece that appeared in today’s New York Times, seeking to explain and situate the rise of SYRIZA in Greece. Kasama is not sharing this because we assume the accuracy of any part of this evaluation, but because it is interesting to see how the flagship of the capitalist press reports on these events.
SYRIZA is a broad coalition rejecting the horrific austerity imposed on Greece. Within it some revolutionary communists work as a minority current.
Sympathy for the Radical Left
By ROSS DOUTHAT
IT is difficult to envision an American parallel to Syriza, the far-left political coalition that has a chance to throw Europe into further turmoil with a victory in this weekend’s Greek elections. But imagine a movement that combines elements from Occupy Wall Street and Ralph Nader’s 2000 presidential campaign, and you have a sense of where Greece’s leading opposition party would fit in the American political spectrum.
The party’s full name translates as Coalition of the Radical Left, which sounds like something that Glenn Beck might have scrawled on his blackboard during the health care debates of 2009 but actually describes the party’s supporters pretty accurately. Syriza is led by a former member of Greece’s Communist Party, and its constituents range from socialists to Trotskyists to groups with beyond-parody names like the Renewing Communist Ecological Left.
Greece is more hospitable to radical politics than the United States, but when Syriza was founded in 2004, it was strictly marginal. It took 3.3 percent of the vote in Greece’s legislative elections that year, while the country’s mainstream center-right and center-left parties won 86 percent of the vote between them.
But that was before the financial crash knocked over Greece’s fiscal house of cards and made its entry in the European Union’s common currency look like one of recent history’s gravest blunders. Today the Greek unemployment rate is 22 percent, the youth unemployment rate is over 50 percent, and the country has no political mainstream anymore. In last month’s legislative elections, the center-right party took 19 percent of the vote, the collapsing center-left party took 13 percent — and sandwiched in between them was Syriza, with as strong a claim to legitimacy as either.
This weekend Greece is voting again, and the Coalition of the Radical Left has a chance to improve on that performance. If it does, and its leadership finds a way to form a coalition government, Syriza has promised to cancel the austerity program that the euro zone effectively imposed on Athens in exchange for loans and bailouts. In doing so, its leaders would be daring the E.U. to push Greece out of the currency union — and the E.U. might have no choice then but to shove.
The elite consensus is that this would represent economic suicide for the Greeks, as well as a potential disaster for Europe as a whole. (And not only Europe: rest assured that the Obama House, too, is praying that Syriza underperforms.)
This consensus is probably correct, and probably persuasive enough to prevent the Greek electorate from delivering the country into the hands of the far left. But there are two realities that explain why so many Greek voters find Syriza attractive.
First, recent experience has given ordinary Europeans no reason to trust elite predictions about anything. The entire E.U. project was hailed as a self-evident good by a generation’s worth of statesmen and intellectuals, and Euroskepticism was confined in many countries to the fringes of the left and right. Now those fringes have been vindicated, and all the statesmen and intellectuals stand exposed.
Yes, a Greece that had never joined the euro wouldn’t have prospered as much during the fat years of the 2000s. But as in the United States, much of that growth has turned out to be illusory. And when a system the entire European establishment promised would deliver prosperity and stability delivers political paralysis and 20 percent unemployment, it becomes hard to convince voters that they have much to lose by listening to extremists and radicals instead.
Second, countries that vote to stay the course now may find that they lose their right to vote at all in the future. The answer to the current crisis, every eurocrat agrees, is further integration: In the words of Germany’s Angela Merkel, “not just a currency union,” but also “a so-called fiscal union, more common budget policies … [and] above all a political union.”
But as The Times’s Floyd Norris noted on Friday, a recent speech by the head of the German Bundesbank suggests that such a union would feature a central authority empowered to bypass national governments whenever they turned uncooperative on budget policy. This would effectively turn the European Union into a kind of postmodern version of the old Austro-Hungarian empire, with a Germanic elite presiding uneasily over a polyglot imperium and its restive local populations.
There are worse political arrangements, certainly, than the old Hapsburg model. But that doesn’t mean that voters in Greece (or Italy, or Spain …) should be expected to quietly acquiesce to it.
This is the irony of Europe’s current predicament. From the point of view of Berlin and Brussels, the only way to save the euro zone is to gradually take power away from voters on the grounds that they can’t be trusted not to vote for radicals like Syriza.
But from the point of view of patriotic Greeks, it’s precisely the threat of losing their sovereignty that might justify a vote for Syriza in the first place.
