A party is falling apart in plain view, broadcast live to the world. For the simplest reason possible: it’s no longer clear what purpose it serves.
What is today’s SYRIZA, the party Tsipras handed over to Kasselakis? What are its aspirations, its vision? What sort of a party is it and what are its prospects? Nobody knows.
Even the conference that was (supposed) to serve as a springboard for a “progressive counter-attack” has ended up in some very unseemly intra-party squabbling.
With the former leader, his successor and all those executives who want to say something or think they have something to say all too willing to leap into the fray. Those who haven’t already left, that is. Because the fact that so many have quit the party or distanced themselves from it only makes matters worse.
Though it didn’t come as a surprise. SYRIZA is falling apart by the exact same process that brought it into the limelight in the first place. Which is to say force of circumstances—fate playing games.
But not just that. It’s obvious that no party can go from defeat to defeat without consequences. And it’s those that bear the responsible for those defeats that are at the receiving end of these consequences now.
Because, after every defeat, SYRIZA was only interested in offloading the burden of that responsibility. In confirming the old leftist formula that “we lost though we’re right, they won though they’re wrong”. In acting in accordance with the same old unproven certainties. In somehow soldiering on as an anachronism in a world that’s moved on.
So SYRIZA may have changed its leader, but it never changed itself. The new leader simply made things worse, in what was probably an alien and unfamiliar political environment.
Which is to say the current showdown hasn’t come as a surprise. But who’s to say there’ll even be a last man standing this time? The polls confirm the ongoing decline, which had begun under Tsipras.
What we probably should be asking is what the people playing the lead roles in this demolition actually want.
If Kasselakis wants to leave, why did he come? If Tsipras wants to come back, why did he leave? And where do all those good folk presiding over the funeral rites think all this is going? Except to the afterlife.
Whatever the case, the SYRIZA we knew is no more. But the problem is that none of the brawlers seem capable of presenting anything new or different.
The only thing that isn’t a foregone conclusion is how long this live-broadcast train wreck is going to take.
