SYRIZA is looking more and more like a sinking ship every day. A ship without a rudder, drifting who knows where as the crew fight among themselves and with the passengers.
Unfortunately, this is the second largest party in the Greek Parliament we’re talking about. The official Opposition.
Till now, the spectacle has had something of a soap opera about it, a certain levity. But now the knives are out. And there’s no turning back.
I have to admit that most people (myself included…) are having a hard time predicting where it’s all going to end. What will become of a party which (you may remember…) came out of nowhere a decade ago to govern Greece? What will be left?
What is certain is that things are going to come to a head sooner rather than later. It’s obvious the torture has to end eventually, even if it’s in a martyr’s death.
What’s also certain is that the SYRIZA we knew has gone for good. It is heading for the graveyard where the parties brought into being by the crisis were buried when it ended.
Since the 2019 elections, SYRIZA has been on borrowed time. Voters gave the party an opportunity to reinvent itself and adapt to the post-crisis situation. It didn’t, and by 2023 it was too late. Its former leader paid the price.
The current crisis clearly has its roots in the past. But it has been exacerbated by the inability of an outdated political organization to function under the leadership of someone they simply do not understand. Apart from everything else, the two sides don’t even speak the same language, or share a worldview or perspective or—obviously—the same political culture. To the extent that they can no longer exist together in the same party.
So a clash was inevitable. But what has happened so far, and will happen in the future, wasn’t.
Various undefined and unruly factors (with Polakis topping the list) have made any form of understanding, or even coexistence, difficult. Even the most respected members of SYRIZA have ended up bickering on TV and questioning what should be self-evident.
Things have gone too far for the road to reasonable compromise to be anything but a pipe dream. SYRIZA (or whatever other name it goes by…) will have to choose a role and a helmsman.
Without that guaranteeing things will get better, even after the inevitable purge.
