Greece At the Fiftieth Anniversary of its Republic:1974-2024
Dimitris Christopoulos
“Walls” (C.P. Cavafy, 1896, 1987)
With no consideration, no pity, no shame,
they have built walls around me, thick and high.
And now I sit here feeling hopeless.
I can’t think of anything else: this fate gnaws my mind –
because I had so much to do outside.
When they were building the walls, how could I not have noticed!
But I never heard the builders, not a sound.
Imperceptibly they have closed me off from the outside world.
In 2024, Greeks were discovered by pollsters to be “the most stressed people in Europe.” This finding overturns a stereotype, but it makes sense. Market forces, climate forces, and anti-democratic forces once again roil the country, as they did at the beginning of the financial crisis. Yet this time, the disturbance is not the product of a breakthrough, as back in 2010, but of a slow and painful—almost “imperceptible”, to borrow from C.P. Cavafy’s “Walls”–continuation: a silent, further shrinking of the rule of law and the withdrawal of social bulwarks, institutional checks and balances, and political resistance.
The fragmentation of the Greek opposition is a product of Syriza’s strategic defeat in the course of 2023, and its subsequent and shocking transformation into a party closer to Independent Greeks (Anel), its populist right-wing governmental partner from 2015 to 2018. This is an ominous scenario for the Hellenic Republic: that of a democracy without an opposition.
This scenario is unfolding in the year in which Greece celebrates the 50th anniversary of the “Metapolitefsi,” the restoration of democracy after the end of the colonels’ regime in 1974.
This text attempts to summarize some highlights of this trajectory.
In politics, voters are more likely to notice what we are right now than what we say we wish to become. This was the sad truth behind Syriza’s electoral failure of 2023. What goes around comes around. However, what went around in 2023 and what will come around in 2024 has a history that goes back a long way.
It all started with the “double electoral earthquake” of 2012, when it seemed that the rising star on the Greek political scene in the place of the crumbling socialist party (Pasok) would surely be Syriza. The star shone, but not for long. Its radiance lasted as long its anti-austerity narrative carried conviction. When the narrative collapsed in that staggering summer of 2015, when the party reluctantly accepted the harsh terms of the EU bailout rather than leave the EU, and lost its parliamentary majority as key members abandoned it, the flaws were all too brightly illuminated. Syriza managed to win the September 2015 election, but by the following day it was clear that the uphill climb was too steep. Without the possibility of escaping the loathsome memoranda of the bail-out agreements, Syriza had lost its political dynamism. The simple answer to today’s plunging polling numbers is that, after a certain point, the people had begun to abhor Syriza, just as from the summer of 2011 to 2015 they abhorred those then in power. This is what the grind of the memoranda entailed: sacrificing a progressive political cohort to save the economy.
Syriza, with the responsibility of all its bigwigs who allowed it, had been transformed into a personality cult. Thus the main focus of disapproval concerned its leader. And while Tsipras generated enthusiasm with his political talent, he also generated personal revulsion, which after the period of opposition from 2019 to 2023, reached unmanageable and irreversible levels.
The 31.5% obtained by Syriza in 2019 was unhoped for, but it was also a poisonous gift. It obscured the party’s structural deficits by making the Syriza leadership believe that “rain or shine,” one third of the Greek people would be on its side. The barren years of opposition that followed, 2019–2023, showed that nothing was more untrue. The double electoral earthquake of 2023 only proved the point.
After the double defeat of that summer and Tsipras’s resignation, it was obvious that, in the absence of the glue between Syriza’s different worlds supplied by the personality of its former leader, the party would not last. And thus came the election of the new leader, Stefanos Kasselakis. Kasselakis is a former high-level employee of Goldman Sachs and as such an unlikely figurehead for a left-wing party. However, the election of the new leader was not just one bad moment. It was a consequence of the many previous bad moments that have been piling up. Yet no one dared to speak out, with few exceptions.
Since the autumn of 2015, Syriza has been like an iceberg in a heatwave, imperceptibly melting away as ever-increasing temperatures become commonplace.
Only seen this way, in the medium term, if not long term, can we realize that the supposed “split” of 2023 was in fact the acceleration of an already advanced disintegration. The departure of officials after the election of a new leader is merely one moment in a long historical process of departures and transformations that began with the earlier split that followed the 2015 capitulation to the austerity program of the bankers.
The most dramatic result of the 2023 departures from Syriza is the formation of a new parliamentary group called the “New Left.” The appearance of the New Left was accompanied by high hopes among many progressives. Yet the New Left performed badly in the European parliamentary elections of June 2024, and this seems most likely due to its resemblance to the old Syriza. The Greek Left is searching for something more.
Within Syriza, under its new leadership, a rapid process of political bloodletting is now taking place, leading to a political identity that seems new but had in fact begun to gestate within the party since 2019. This new political identity is the transformation of Syriza into a political type of “anything goes” opportunism. Nothing is out of bounds; liberalism and statism are equally acceptable. As are both pro- and anti-immigrant discourse: the party’s leader accused the conservatives of inviting in Pakistani migrants and labelled this an “Islamabad agenda.” The party has gestured both toward the “traditional values of Greek society” and toward a “return to the future.” Toward a glorification of labour and a glorification of capital. And many more paradoxes. One clear certainty is that Syriza as a principled anti-rightist party is heading towards its historical end, the same fate that befell the supposed socialism of Pasok between 2010 and 2012.
Another certainty is that this process did not occur in 2023, nor can it be charged (or credited, depending on one’s perspective) to its new leader. For this reason, the claim that Syriza split after Kasselakis’s election is incongruous. The leader’s “unmediated” relationship with the party’s people, i.e. a relationship free of the baggage of any procedures that hint at democratic collectivity within a living party, is not Kasselakis’s invention. The road had been paved by the previous incumbent. In this sense, then, despite the obvious discrepancies and differences, the current Syriza leadership is a continuation of the previous one.
But in any case, if the Italian Communist Party of a Togliatti, of a Berlinguer, ended up via D’Alema in the neoliberal caricature of a Renzi, it is not historically inconsistent for the Syriza of Tsipras to end up in the neoliberal caricature we see in the party of Kasselakis. I mean this without any sarcasm.
Fifty years after the founding of the Third Hellenic Republic in 1974, after the fall of the U.S.-backed military dictatorship, the Right is setting an agenda on its own, unchecked. For a country that until a few years ago was treated by many in the EU as an austerity-era equivalent of the village of indomitable Gauls in Asterix, fighting off the Roman legions of Julius Caesar with the help of a magic potion, the development is, if not unthinkable, hard to take.
Note, however, that the problem is not the Right’s political hegemony, but its conditions: a feeble opposition, one-sided control of the media, the fragmentation of social movements, and the manipulation of independent authorities and the judiciary. The problem is not in itself the 41% that the Right got in the national elections. We have seen 41% and even 48% before. Karamanlis in 1974, when the Third Hellenic Republic was beginning its journey, got 54%, but in the aftermath of the junta, he set the agenda only by compromising with a strong social opposition.
The issue today is the cumulative absence of social bulwarks, political resistance and institutional checks and balances. From the economic crisis to the pandemic and from the pandemic to the energy and climate crisis, democracy itself is suffering. And it suffers more when the opposition is virtually absent, something that is now typical in Greece. In a resolution adopted by the European Parliament on 7 February 2024, its members sounded the alarm on the steep decline of the rule of law in Greece. An infamous wiretapping scandal, the unresolved murder of journalist Giorgos Karaivaz, the Tempi train crash, systematic pushbacks of refugees and migrants in Greek waters, together with the intimidation of journalists, the undermining of independent authorities, the shrinking space for civil society and media pluralism, are all symptoms of democratic backsliding.
Yet this time, it is the European Parliament, and not anti-government NGOs (the usual suspects for the Greek government), calling “on the Greek government to restore independent authorities, ensure unhindered investigations into the illegitimate wiretappings and implement the recommendations of the Parliament’s PEGA [Pegasus] Committee”. MEP Sophie in ’t Veld emphasised that the EU needs to take its own lessons from the past: “We have seen democracy and the rule of law backslide in a number of EU member states. We know what the signs are, and Greece is showing them right now. Unlike Viktor Orbán, the Greek government puts up a friendly face towards the EU, but this is no reason to keep EU scrutiny at arms-length. We cannot make the same mistake of wait and see, like we did with Hungary and Poland.”
The most alarming development here is that the strongest reaction to the European Parliament resolution did not come from the Greek government itself but from the plenary of the Greek Supreme Court. Paradoxically enough, the Greek judges (by a majority of 49 to 13) on 15 February deemed it appropriate to answer to a political body, the European Parliament, and slammed the resolution as a “direct interference in the work of the Greek judicial authorities, regarding a series of cases that are pending before the courts, with unproven and unsubstantiated allegations.”
Such a reaction from a national judiciary body in 2024 is unheard of.
The unprecedented situation that Greece finds itself in today is in effect a herald of illiberal characteristics in the polity.
The most glaring proofs that democracy is degenerating in Greece, though not in Greece alone, include:
- Direct control of the secret services and public television by the top of the executive branch.
- Deactivation of the independent authorities.
- Devaluation of parliamentary control.
- Lack of media pluralism.
- Manipulation of the heads of the judiciary.
- Consolidation of an all-powerful government with no visible possibility of change.
Impressive as it is, this democratic degeneration cannot be properly thought of as an unexpected disaster. A morbidity that until recently would have seemed out of bounds has become familiar. The old boundaries and barriers have dropped from sight. We waited for it, and we did not realize that it was already happening. Evil, then, is not only the emergence of the unknown but the continuation of what we knew too well but proved unable to avoid.
For this reason, the picture of the future of the Third Hellenic Republic does not inspire optimism. “Natural” disasters–fires and floods–are recurring to the extent that they have now become a permanent emergency. A country that has received so many refugees from abroad is now sending out climate refugees of its own. Since the beginning of the financial crisis, there has been a brain drain of monumental proportions. At the same time, the Greek economy is crying out for workers in the primary sector, in construction and tourism. But there are none. Purchasing power has plummeted below two-thirds of the European average. And we in Greece wonder why people are leaving. Among the EU 27 today, only Bulgaria ranks below Greece in purchasing power.
As it celebrates its fiftieth anniversary, the Third Hellenic Republic is feeling exhausted—and the exhausted state of its democracy is certainly not an exclusively Greek affair. The institutions of accountability are withering. Parliamentary control is becoming inert. Independent authorities–once a great promise–are silenced when they do their job because they are a nuisance. The judiciary is faltering to the point of self-cancellation. The lack of pluralism in the press is shameful. Wiretaps have come to seem not scandalous but normal. For years to come, what is and what is not said (especially the latter) in the public sphere will not be the result of free will but the fruit of fear and blackmail. This is a nightmare.
We, therefore, have good reason to doubt that the years to come will be happy for the Hellenic Republic, or for constitutional democracy in Europe as a whole.
Predictions are overwhelmingly against an advancement towards consolidating and expanding democracy, both in the field of climate crisis management and in that of social justice and suffering institutions. This is not, however, an exclusively Greek phenomenon.
It is probably the first time in the history of the EU that the Brussels bureaucracy stands embarrassed in the face of the overwhelming hegemony of the Right across Europe. After the European parliamentary elections of June 2024, the picture is even more frightening. The European Alt-Right now appears to be the most dynamic opposition to its neighboring pro-European Right; outside the Right there is little choice. Italy and France are leading the way. Greece is following.
This situation fills democratically-minded people with despair. And for those of us who do not admit defeat, there is, above all, stress. Fatalism is less stressful, but it is not a solution. If there is no guaranteed happy end, as in the old Hollywood films, we can take some consolation from the fact that there is no end at all. The future, as Althusser said, lasts a long time.
Dimitris Christopoulos is Professor in the Department of Political Science and History and Dean of the Political Sciences Faculty at Panteion University.
