Syriza’s victory

The drama of Greek politics has been a struggle over the status quo, the meaning of politics, and the very possibility of a future.
Represented by outgoing Prime Minister Antonis Samaras, the political establishment was intent on fuelling voters’ fear of the unknown, in this case left-wing Syriza, headed by Alexis Tsipras, winning at the polls.
Samaras’s overall strategy was to associate the existing order with order in general, suggesting that Syriza’s eventual victory would foreshadow not just a different, let alone a more just, political-economic arrangement, but total disorder and collapse.
Two and a half years ago, in the 2012 elections, Greek citizens responded in a lukewarm way to Samaras’ strategy: They handed the first place at the polls to his party, while Syriza finished second with 26.9 percent of the total vote. The real question of Sunday’s polls, however, was whether the majority felt they had anything to lose by voting for a party that promised a completely fresh start for their country. In other words, did some sort of an ‘end of the world’ already happen in Greece, rendering the rhetoric of the status quo ineffective?
The results show that the answer to this question is a resounding ‘yes’. That is not surprising, given the country’s 25.8 percent unemployment rate, 34.6 percent relative poverty rate, plunging consumer confidence, and mounting national debt.
If politics as usual became unacceptable to Greek voters, it is because they perceived that the national elite’s response to the economic catastrophe was itself catastrophic.
Alexis Tsipras’ emphasis on hope is a textbook case of offering the people a way of relating to the future that is diametrically opposed to the conservative bet on fear. However, far more crucial than the Hobbesian contrast between the uses of hope and fear as means of stimulating or controlling the population, the political contest has been about the field of possibilities – one might say, about the very possibility of possibility.
On the one hand, Samaras reiterated the conservative and European Union position that austerity is the only way out of the unprecedented crisis in Greece and the rest of southern Europe. The array of political possibilities thus narrowed down to one, which rendered politics superfluous and replaced it with dictates, stemming for the most part outside Greek borders.
On the other hand, Tsipras laid out the vision that another world is possible. Although Syriza tends to be characterised as an ‘anti-austerity party’, its programme is not an armchair critique of ‘the way things are’; it contains concrete proposals for growth and job creation and a ‘European New Deal’ complete with debt restructuring and EU public investment.
Substantively, this plan of action offers a future for Greece, where the current levels of national debt and unemployment are unsustainable and inconsistent with the continuation of the social contract. Formally, it reinvigorates political and economic debates with a sense of possibility that, until not so long ago, did not so much as register on the radars of the status quo.
On January 25, Greek voters rejected the suffocating measures foisted upon them by a conservative government in line with the plan devised by the EU together with financial institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund.
Syriza’s victory signals the end of institutionalised consensus, the revival of politics as a whole and a new opening for the future. It is now up to the rest of Europe to heed the Greek call.
Excerpted from: ‘Is Syriza's victory a shift for Europe?’.
Courtesy: Aljazeera.com