Why left populism failed

New Statesman​

4 days ago

Photo byTen years ago this summer, as Jeremy Corbyn scraped onto the ballot in the Labour Party leadership election, the hopes of the European left centred on Greece, where a radical left government was seeking to restructure the country's debt and roll back brutal austerity that had seen suicide, unemployment and home repossessions rocket. As negotiations reached an impasse, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras announced that he would put the Eurozone's offer to a referendum. The rallies for the No (or 'Oxi') campaign, which he addressed, were the biggest public gatherings in Greece since the fall of the colonels in 1974.
I was in Athens to witness the campaign, and when the result came through on 5 July – an overwhelming 61 per cent rejection – I saw the city's streets erupt in celebration. Less than two weeks later, Tsipras had signed up to the bailout package, pushing it through the Greek parliament with the help of his former opponents. Riot police were sent in to break up the same crowds who had cheered him on. Tear gas flew outside the parliament building, and police rode through the fleeing crowd on motor bikes, swiping indiscriminately with batons. Unlike the years of the mass anti-austerity movement that had led to Syriza's rise, the protests now were going through the motions. Police fielded routine petrol bombs near Exarchia. Gatherings in Syntagma Square felt like an angry wake.
There were no easy options for the government. Defying the demands of 'the Troika' – the European Commission, European Central Bank and the IMF – would have meant a sudden return to the Drachma. Economic and humanitarian crisis would have been the result whichever way Tsipras turned. But the abrupt betrayal of both the election and the referendum set the Greek and European left back years. Tsipras won snap elections in September 2015, but did so at the head of a different party. Syriza lost many of its activists and almost half of its large central committee. Its youth wing voted to dissolve itself.
Ten years on, the basic lesson of the Greek Oxi referendum is that new left parties – however populist and radical – can and do 'Pasokify' themselves. Whether you are Zarah Sultana or Zack Polanski, it is worth paying attention to the fate of Syriza – which, despite the British left's current momentum, could well be theirs.
Pasok, Greece's social democratic party, had dominated Greek politics for decades. It signed the first bailout package in 2010, implementing harsh austerity and privatisation measures. By the January 2015 elections, it had lost 90 per cent of its voters and came in seventh place. Pasokification was the fate of the French Socialist Party, the Dutch Labour Party, and to a lesser extent the German Social Democrats. If current polling holds, Starmer's Labour is next.
Syriza was the original new left alternative to a failing centre-left. In 2019, having implemented the third bailout package, it lost two thirds of its voters and left office. When Tsipras stood down as leader in 2023, the party elected Stefanos Kasselakis, an American former banker and shipping investor who had once supported the centre-right New Democracy. Kasselakis was later removed and split to form his own party, leaving Syriza once again behind Pasok in the Greek parliament. Syriza's once mighty youth support has evaporated, and it is now polling in sixth place.
The Oxi vote was the high watermark of the immediate revolt against austerity in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The response of the European establishment was a fork in the road. Faced with mass opposition to austerity and the neoliberal economic consensus, it ploughed on. In backrooms, figures like the IMF's Christine Lagarde freely admitted that austerity measures would not work, and would instead deepen Greece's recession. But allowing Syriza to pursue a different path, backed by a popular mandate, would have been politically ruinous for governments which had asked their own populations to swallow cuts and wage depression.
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Rather than give the radical left an opportunity, the European institutions stamped on Greece. Europe's centre-left and centre-right preferred a strategy of accommodation to a rising tide of nationalist and anti-migrant politics. Now, the new far right are in or near power in all but a couple of the EU's founding member states. Nigel Farage is odds on to be our next prime minister.
In 2015, the Greek left was fighting from within the Euro and at the European periphery. It had the strongest organised left on the continent and a recent history of military dictatorship. In all these senses, it could not have been further from the post-Corbyn British left. But in the sense that it is the only example of the new post-crash left leading a government, the lessons it offers are invaluable.
One of the founding promises of Syriza was that it represented a new kind of politics. When it came to power in January 2015, many of its newly elected MPs had never been near parliament before. The party was young, dynamic and above all rooted in the mass movements that had brought it to power. Even when Tsipras wrote to Angela Merkel offering concessions, many activists on the campaign trail that summer earnestly believed that their leaders would not act against the wishes of party members, let alone against the overwhelming mandate of a referendum. Some knew government ministers personally.
But as Corbynism demonstrated, 'a new kind of politics' is just a slogan – even if its supporters took it as an oath. Had the Syriza government been accountable to its members and activists, it would not have been possible to capitulate to the Troika in the summer of 2015. But Syriza had taken over the institutions of the state, and those institutions had a logic of their own. As soon as it won power, the party's internal democracy barely functioned.
Having had its institutions crushed by Thatcherism, the British left has many weaknesses for which it shouldn't blame itself. Its persistent lack of internal democracy is not one of them. Corbynism transformed our politics, but behind the crowds and the aesthetic edge, it was conventional. Faced with a hostile parliamentary party, the project ended up in a bunker, relying on standard party management methods. Labour members were not permitted to set policy, and no major democratic reform of the party took place. Instead of allowing Momentum to emerge as a messy, independent project, the leadership backed moves to shut down its local groups and democratic structures. The culture of the new Labour left was, above all, loyalist.
Corbynism had little organisational legacy. But when the cost of living crisis hit in 2022, and the UK was gripped by its biggest wave of strikes since the 1980s, the left had an opportunity to rebuild politically. It failed to do so. One problem was that the most prominent vehicle for the left, Enough is Enough, amassed a huge email list, held some big rallies, and then, rather than build local groups and democratic structures, vanished. Where healthy left organisations are built from the bottom up, today's left has a habit of relying on celebrities and hollow online hype. We teach people to be spectators and cheerleaders.
We are trained by mainstream political analysis to counterpose effectiveness and democracy, and to associate relentless professionalisation with electoral success. If you are part of an establishment for whom politics is essentially an elite sport, this is reasonable. Had Blair or Starmer allowed party members a say over party policy or candidate selection, they would not have been able to enact their strategies of choice. The radical left cannot win this way. When Tsipras signed the third bailout package, he escaped the messiness of running an anti-establishment party and his popularity initially rose. But the character of the project was irretrievable.
The social conditions that swept Syriza to power and which almost put Jeremy Corbyn in Downing Street in 2017 are, if anything, even sharper now. The resurgence of the British left – perhaps as an electoral alliance between a new left party and a Zack Polanski-led Green Party – could come soon, and with a force few commentators expect. In 2027, Jean-Luc Mélenchon could win the French presidency. The first wave of the new European left was up against a failing centre; now, it must fight toe-to-toe with the far right. To succeed, it must learn not only how to win elections, but how to keep its soul intact.
[See also: Inside the factions of the new left]
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