David Adler: The three mistakes behind Syriza’s demise in Greece
Tspiras did not simply capitulate to the troika, or swap his radical ideals for hard-nosed realism. He actively refashioned his government as a rightwing force on the world stage... Syriza shows that mimicking the right does little to slow its rise. On the contrary, Tsipras’s flirtation with militarism and neoliberalism caused his party to lose its core identity, emboldening its opponents along the way.Why settle for Syriza’s centre-right pandering, many voters asked, when you could have the real thing?
In January 2015, Alexis
Tspiras stormed to power as a firebrand of the radical left. He vowed to wage
war against the Greek oligarchy, stand up to the EU technocracy and strike fear
into the hearts of investors around the world. “Greece leaves
behind catastrophic austerity, it leaves behind fear and
authoritarianism, it leaves behind five years of humiliation and anguish,” he
proclaimed to a throng of supporters on election day in 2015.
But that was then. In
the four years that followed, Tsipras tried desperately to endear himself to
the establishment he once pledged to fight. He protected the old oligarchs and
ushered in a generation of new ones. He implemented austerity measures so brutal that even Germany’s
finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble accused him of “putting the burden on the
weak”. And he placated international investors with big promises of small taxes
and golden visas. “Reforms are like a
bicycle,” Tsipras told
the Financial Times. “If you don’t [make] them, you fall down.”
