Syriza

Kevin Ovenden

Description

* Shortlisted for the Academy of British Cover Design Awards, 2015*



Greece's recent political turmoil captured the imagination of the left across Europe. Elected in January 2015 under the leadership of Alexis Tsipras, the radical Syriza party sought to challenge the European economic status-quo and secure a better future for the Greek people. The fierce confrontation with Greece's creditors which followed reverberated around the world.



Kevin Ovenden tells the rocky story of Syriza's first six months in office. Despite the party's many defeats, the rise (and fall) of Syriza is a symbolic and important story to tell. The twists and turns of the bailout negotiations with the Troika, the brief reign of iconoclastic Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, and the worrying rise of Golden Dawn and the extreme right all converge to create a pivotal moment in Europe's recent history.



Published in partnership with the Left Book Club.

Series Preface

Foreword by Paul Mason

Preface

1. Between Things Ended and Things Begun

2. The Resisted Rise of Syriza

3. Their Austerity and Our Resistance

4. The Monstrous Legacy of Racism

5. Lost in the Labyrinth

6. Face to Face with the Deep State

7. The Maw of the Minotaur

8. Revolt, Retreat and Rupture

Notes

About Philosophy Football

Sujets

• Political Parties
• Political Advocacy
• Political Process
• Political Ideologies
• Political Science
• Advocacy group
• Communism
• Eurozone
• General officer
• European Union
• General
• Union européenne
• Greece
• Communisme
• Zone euro

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 septembre 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783716975
• Langue: English

Extrait

Syriza
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Syriza
Inside the Labyrinth
Kevin Ovenden
Foreword by Paul Mason
First published 2015 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Kevin Ovenden 2015
The right of Kevin Ovenden to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 3686 2 Paperback ISBN 978 1 7837 1696 8 PDF eBook ISBN 978 1 7837 1698 2 Kindle eBook ISBN 978 1 7837 1697 5 EPUB eBook
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.
Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Text design by Melanie Patrick Simultaneously printed in the European Union and United States of America
Dedicated to the memories of
Pavlos Fyssas (1979–2013) and Shahzad Luqman (1986–2013)
zindabad, ζουν – they live
Contents
Series Preface
Foreword by Paul Mason
Preface
1. Between Things Ended and Things Begun
2. The Resisted Rise of Syriza
3. Their Austerity and Our Resistance
4. The Monstrous Legacy of Racism
5. Lost in the Labyrinth
6. Face to Face with the Deep State
7. The Maw of the Minotaur
8. Revolt, Retreat and Rupture
Notes
About Philosophy Football
Series Preface
The first Left Book Club (1936–48) had 57,000 members at its peak, distributed 2 million books, and had formed 1,200 workplace and local groups engaging in cultural and political activity, including solidarity work (e.g. with Spain), political agitation (against appeasement) and much else. The LBC became an educational mass movement, remodelling British public opinion, and was thought to have been a major factor in the Labour landslide of 1945 and the construction of the welfare state. Publisher Victor Gollancz, the driving force, saw the LBC as a movement against poverty, fascism, and the growing threat of war. He aimed to resist the tide of austerity and appeasement, and to present radical ideas for progressive social change in the interests of working people. The Club was about enlightenment, empowerment and collective organisation.
The world today faces a crisis on the scale of the 1930s. Capitalism is trapped in a long-term crisis due to the dominance of finance over production and austerity programmes, causing suffering, shrinking demand and widening social inequalities, which are tearing apart the social fabric. International relations are increasingly tense and militarised – notably in the Middle East and Eastern Europe – with the danger of war. Neo-fascist and racist groups are gaining ground across much of Europe. Global warming threatens the planet and the whole of humanity with climate catastrophe. Workplace organisation has been weakened, and social democratic parties have been hollowed out by acceptance of pro-market dogma. Society has become more atomised, with politics suffering through peoples’ widespread alienation from the system. Yet the last decade has seen historically unprecedented levels of participation in street protest, implying a mass audience for progressive policies. But socialist ideas are no longer, as they were in the immediate post-war period, ‘in the tea’. One of neoliberalism’s achievements has been to undermine ideas of solidarity, collective provision and public service.
Relaunching the Left Book Club will help us rise to the challenge posed by the global crisis. We will provide a series of high-quality books at affordable prices, published by Pluto Press. Our list will represent a full range of progressive traditions, perspectives and ideas. It will also include reprints of classic texts where appropriate. We hope the books will be used as the basis of reading circles, discussion groups, and other educational and cultural activities relevant to developing, sharing and disseminating ideas for progressive social change in the interests of working people.
The Left Book Club collective
Foreword
Paul Mason
One of our friends in the café, crying. The primary school kids she works with have started to draw euros, cut them out and take them home for their mothers. ‘All they hear on the TV, and at home, is about euros, and the lack of money,’ she says.
It’s the second week of the eurozone’s economic blitz on Greece. Medicines, hospital disposables and imported meat are flashing red in the supply chain systems. The banks are closed. Businesses are going bust. But 61 per cent of Greek people have just voted to defy the onslaught and carry on resisting.
It is already clear the eurozone is determined – as the German magazine Stern put it – to ‘smash Greece’. It would take them two more weeks to force the government into unwilling submission. But the people did not submit.
Another friend, a woman in a fashion business, told her bosses she was voting No in the referendum. ‘Don’t come in again,’ they told her. Another, who works for a magazine, arrived at work before the referendum to find an envelope placed on everybody’s desk, containing a ballot paper pre-marked with a Yes vote. The entire workforce voted No.
In the run-up to the referendum every private TV channel ran wall-to-wall propaganda for Yes. It was, for many, the final straw – tipping the waverers over to No during that fateful weekend.
The 5 July referendum, and the imposed third memorandum that followed, marked a turning point both for Syriza and Greece. It demonstrated – not just to Greeks but to the wider left and centre left of Europe – that the eurozone has become a German construct: a game rigged in favour of creating jobs in Germany and destroying them in a broad arc from Lisbon to Thessaloniki.
It demonstrated for the third time in two years the cruel power central banks can wield in a financialised capitalism where the ability to lift a spoon to your baby’s mouth depends on the whim of a committee whose arguments are not minuted, whose votes are not explained. The Greek economy was choked close to death by the European Central Bank’s refusal to extend emergency lending – and there was no court, no higher body to which the victims of this medieval-style siege warfare could appeal.
On the night Syriza won the election, 25 January 2015, I sat in Athens with journalists who had covered the election at the grassroots, numb: unable to face going to the Tsipras victory rally. We knew at some point this mass enthusiasm and hope would clash with the dour reality of a Europe designed for stagnation and economic servitude. We all knew we had a duty to document this – and Kevin Ovenden’s book fulfils that duty superbly.
We don’t know, yet, the full story. But the virtue of writing swiftly a comprehensive first draft of the events is that the filter of ideology, subsequent revelation, and future political allegiances cannot be applied. It is as close to the truth as one person’s eyes and brain can take us. There will be other versions, and a bigger truth will emerge, but the story Ovenden narrates follows the same arc as the one I lived through.
There was the surge of hope during the election, where all the modernising forces in Greece clustered around Alexis Tsipras, shattering the impetus of the coalition parties. Tiny villages in the mountains, which had voted for the oligarchic parties for decades, swung to Syriza by margins in excess of the overall 36 per cent poll result.
Then there was Varoumania. Yanis Varoufakis emerged late into the narrative of Syriza and even now, in August 2015, facing a politicised prosecution attempt, his personality mesmerises the global media to an extent that obscures what really happened. Varoumania began on the day he ‘killed the Troika’ in a tetchy meeting with his Dutch counterpart Jeroen Dijsselbloem in Brussels and ended on 20 February with Syriza being forced to abandon 70 per cent of its election programme.
Then there was what seems, in retrospect, a long, hypnotic period in which protests subsided, social movements lay dormant, and Syriza struggled to make any of its remaining policies stick. I’ve seen, from the inside, ministries run with only politicians and political advisers, the civil servants sidelined because they were suspected of acting for the opposition, or for Germany itself.
Like Bolivian president Evo Morales, whom I met during the first period of his time in office, Syriza at times felt like prisoners in these ministries. By contrast, on the streets, the ministers were hailed as heroes. You can only understand what it meant for Varoufakis to be mobbed by well-wishers in the May Day crowd if you consider that, after mid 2011, no minister could be interviewed on the street in Athens. For the pro-Troika politicians after the second memorandum, life had become a world of bodyguards, shuttered offices and secret tunnels.
Ovenden’s book captures – as very few news reports have captured – the atmosphere of this fascinating interregnum and the shock of what replaced it: the ‘rupture’, which, when it came, stunned many who had believed that Syriza in power would never decisively resist the creditors.
Ovenden is one of a small, unlikely group of British journalists – drawn from the left and the unorthodox right – who have tried to cut through stereotypes and ignorance to tell the story of the Greek resistance. As such, he will be pilloried with the stock insult applied to all of us: that we are re-treads of Lord Byron, drawn to this hot-tempered country out of