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Syriza's limited options

Unless Syriza changes its rhetoric now and unless it explains the facts about the EU and the economy, it will be incapable of justifying any of these decisions to its voters several months down the line.

By Pavlos Eleftheriadis
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Alexis Tsipras with Independent Greeks leader Panos Kammenos. Flickr/sher xla. Some rights reserved.Syriza, the Greek radical Left party, won power in January promising an end to austerity. Many commentators in Europe believe that on this basis it must be an anti-austerity party.

They are wrong. Austerity is only a small part of its platform. Syriza originates in a coalition of anti-capitalist, Marxist and leftist groups. Its main emphasis is hostility to markets and to globalisation.

Syriza has some mainstream commitments: it defends rights of immigrants and minorities, criticises social and political inequality and seeks to curb the power of the oligarchs. But its overall message is overwhelmingly one of nationalist and anti-market populism, where the Greek people are always the victim and the enemies are either foreign or rich, or both.

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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0