Slavoj Žižek, Alexis Tsipras and Oliver Stone on Subversive Festival 2013 in Zagreb. Wikicommons/Robert Crc.Some rights reservedOn September 20, in spite of the low (and perfectly understandable) low voter turnout, Alexis Tsipras secured another victory by a relatively large majority, following which he announced his plans for a SYRIZA-ANEL coalition 2.0. Unlike the first time round, though, he will do so with the support of a much more united (for now) party, since the anti-euro leftist minority has broken away from the party to form Popular Unity, which failed to win a single seat in parliament.
SYRIZA’s victory is, of course, great news: the survival of the only leftist and anti-neoliberal government on the continent is a hugely important event, in light of the European political-financial oligarchy’s numerous attempts to topple it, including a brutal strategy of financial asphyxiation for which the ECB will one day have to answer (both legally and politically). That said, there’s no sense in denying that this is also a bitter victory: we all know that the government’s manoeuvring room is severely limited by the third Memorandum of Understanding’s (MoU) numerous red lines.
These elections took place in what is effectively a regime of ‘limited sovereignty’ – a condition that to a lesser degree applies to all EMU countries, meaning that the issue at stake was not the continuation or otherwise of austerity (as SYRIZA, somewhat naïvely, framed it in the January elections), but simply the methods of administration and distribution across society of the austerity measures. At the same time, it would be absurd (and rather infantile in Lenin’s sense of the word) to draw the conclusion from this – as many on the European left have done in recent weeks – that the elections were meaningless, that it made no difference whether SYRIZA or the country’s conservative right came to power, since ‘Greece’s fate is already written elsewhere’ (meaning Brussels, Frankfurt and Berlin).
