you know about european politics. is it good that the anti-capitalist party won elections in greece? i feel like that has to be good but usually there's some kind of catch or thing i'm not seeing to stuff like that, so if there is i figured you would know about it and could explain.
It's really good! First of all for the simple fact that it is a party wholly committed to lessening the austerity facing the Greek people, and almost wholly committed to working internationally to reduce the austerity facing the people of Europe. Second, because it's the Left's first real victory in unmitigated terms after the financial crisis. Third, because this might be a springboard for a more important societal transformation for the better at a decade-long level, assuming social forces can be harnessed and threats weathered. But of course, there's always a catch. Part of it is the usual, the working class can never be emancipated by the state, but it's more in-depth than that.
You don't get to a 36.3% vote as a singular hegemonic force. Syriza is comprised of numerous tendencies across a wide range of political, social, and class conditions. While it has been very good at keeping any sort of entryism from the various ruling patronage networks out of the party, it's also has its far share of people who want to head up the new patronage networks that will inevitably form. There will be fights, and winning them will depend on how powerful the social movements that helped form Syriza are. In the past few years of New Democracy rule, there's been a general demoralization. Unions in particular have faced extremely harsh times, and need to be regenerated quickly. When movements have gone to bat, they've typically been explosive but sporadic. Ensuring government support for them so that they can grow and pressure the government to the left is a major issue. There's also combat between political tendencies inside the party structure. After the last election, the Syriza leadership built up a firewall between social movements and itself. The stated reason was to prevent right entryism from taking over (in fact, far left tendencies have managed to increase their voting share in the party), but it also coincides with a decision by the party to become more personality focused. This means that social movements will have to fight harder to be heard, especially when many of the personalities are more associated with the right currents in the party than the left currents.
Syriza has built itself up by being a party that leftists could join at the national level while still retaining independent views. So for instance, when Greece saw back-to-back local and European elections in 2014, the farther left Antarsya ran against Syriza in both. In local elections, Antarsya reached around 2%, but in European elections, they only managed 0.72%, because their support at the national level mostly went into Syriza. Parts of the alliance have even run against each other at times. For instance, when the more right wing Synapsimos tried to break with tradition and run a former PASOK candidate in the Attica elections in 2010, this was seen as conceding too much to non-revolutionaries. A group of Trotskyist and Maoist parties instead ran a candidate against Syn's and won. It also made a name for itself by going into the major social movements that were going on at the time, instead of boycotting them for being not anti-Capitalist enough as the KKE has done, and saying "Hey, the left loves you, so you should love the left". This has in fact lead to an increased far left presence among Syriza, not a watering down of the movement, because they were able to convince people who care about specific issues to move to the left as a whole. It has also engendered a very big faultline in the party over the Euro. The common currency is seen as a symbol of Westernness, something that means that Greeks will one day have the living standards of Western Europeans. The more right wing and nationalist tendencies have thus made a stand around staying in the Eurozone even if that means some concessions on the debt, while more left wing figures like Costas Lapavitsas have instead made rather detailed plans for a move back to the Drachma if debt negotiations go sour.
And that in turn encapsulates the greatest fight of all: the negotiations won't go smoothly. There are still massive patronage networks in Greece that have to be shut down. The oligarchs are like Venezuela's and have been putting up headlines in the media like "Tsipras: Pull a Papandreou and Ditch the Loony Left". They sponsored the To Potomi (The River) Party just so that Syriza's most willing coalition partner would also be extremely pro-Euro. Yannis Varoufakis, the likely finance minister (and one time in-house economist for Valve Software) just gave an interview where he said their number one priority was ending the oligarchs for good. That's going to be a wild fight without a majority. Fortunately, there's little risk of a coup from the military in the immediate term, but the police in particular have many links to Fascism. At the moment, in addition to Golden Dawn, New Democracy's ruling clique were Fascists in their youth and have kept up their nationalism, while the Independent Greeks have run a Front National-like line that makes them almost-Fascists even as they suck up to Syriza to be a coalition partner. And that's all within the country. The global banking system is about to run a good cop-bad cop routine like nothing you've ever seen, hoping to get the best damn deal they can squeeze out of the party. Yeah, it's a good thing that Socialists won in the Greek elections, but I think we all know that life's hard for an anti-Capitalist even in the best of times.
