In Thessaloniki this week, some Syriza activists have found brief relief in a bit of gallows humour. You can buy many kinds of local pastries, or bougatsa, in the city – bougatsa with cheese, cream, or mince meat. “Soon we’ll be having bougatsa with memorandum,” smiled Syriza activist Tassos Gkouvas, as he drank coffee on Wednesday with Athina Teskou, a member of the local party’s governing committee.
The joke is particularly bittersweet in Thessaloniki, Greece’s second city. It was here, last September, that Alexis Tsipras unveiled the manifesto that became known as the Thessaloniki Programme. It was this anti-austerity package that the Syriza leader was then elected in January to implement. And it was that package that Tsipras in effect renounced on Sunday by agreeing to another EU memorandum aimed at ushering in exactly the things Syriza said it would oppose.
For Gkouvas and Teskou, the decision was shocking and disorientating. “If Syriza votes for this, it completely transforms Syriza into something else,” said Gkouvas. “It’s the end of left politics within Syriza. The difference between the left and the right [is about whether] you are for or against memorandums.”
The pair’s shock mirrors the internal debate taking place within the party at large. Tsipras and his allies say he had no other choice but to abandon Syriza’s central policy: a rejection of the EU’s latest austerity deal – in the face of such intransigence from the Eurogroup ministers – would have prompted Greece’s total economic collapse.
But it is seen as a betrayal by many in both the party’s rank-and-file members and its higher echelons. More than half of its central committee has rejected the deal, as well as several key MPs. On Wednesday Tsipras was preparing to force the deal through parliament with the support of opposition MPs.
The disagreement has the potential to rip apart the radical party, which was already a delicate amalgam of more than a dozen leftist groups, whose members range from the hard left to the those of a comparatively centrist bent.
Asked if they were thinking of leaving the party, Gkouvas and Teskou smiled, and waited for the next question. “You can write that we paused,” said Teskou.
Others in the party are less coy. “We must not leave Syriza now,” said Giorgos Kiritsis, a former Syriza parliamentary candidate in Thessaloniki, shortly before a meeting of the party’s local branch. “We must remain – to bring Syriza back to our side. If we lose the internal battle, then we should leave. But not before.”
In Kiritsis’s view, Tsipras is a good man who has been led astray by a circle of centrists, and he needs a cabinet reshuffle to phase them out. “Throw out the neoliberal people who have a negative effect on the prime minister,” said Kiritsis, “and have a government of the pure left.”
But for Gkouvas and Teskou, such a purge may already be too late. “Giorgos says he doesn’t want to leave the party, but rebuild it,” said Gkouvas. “But where is the party to rebuild?”
Some activists argue the party has tried hard to be inclusive. Several of its parliamentary candidates in Thessaloniki were enlisted from other progressive movements in the city – people such as Kiritsis, who helped run the campaign against a local gold mine, and Georgos Archontopoulos, who led calls to turn the city’s water board into a cooperative. “Syriza took people from the movements,” said Archontopoulos, “to show symbolically that it is supporting them.”
But by Gkouvas’s account, Syriza’s management is nevertheless too reliant on an old core of campaigners, and hasn’t involved enough people from a new wave of members who joined in the past three years. “In these conditions, there’s not a working party to go inside of and transform,” he said.
Some of Syriza’s disenchanted members are ambivalent about leaving the eurozone. “It’s not about the coin we use,” said Teskou. But most are angry that Tsipras did not seriously consider Grexit as an option, much less formulate a plan to achieve it. As a result, Tsipras was unable to use the mandate provided to him by the recent referendum as an effective bargaining chip in the last round of negotiations.
“In my opinion,” said Gkouvas, “they didn’t go back to Brussels this week as if they had the backing of the result of the referendum.” Since Tsipras had no serious plan to leave the euro, the thinking goes, by extension he had no means of calling the troika’s bluff.
These disagreements could in theory result in a rupture within Syriza, and then the fall of Tsipras’s government. But in the elections that would follow in this scenario, there are those who would not bet against Tsipras winning power again. In a cafe a few streets away, Dimitris Kouvelas – a politician from New Democracy (ND), the centre-right party Syriza beat in January’s elections – grudgingly argued that Tsipras still had a lot of political capital, despite his volte-face.
“I don’t think that people want to listen to politicians from the past,” said Kouvelas, the vice-president of Thessaloniki’s city council. “So I think that the Greek people will still support him. He’s still quite popular, far more than other political leaders.” A breakaway radical rump from Syriza might only get 5%, Kouvelas reckoned, whereas Tsipras’s new party could even increase its share of the vote by eating into that of New Democracy and Pasok, a centre-left party.
Kostas Marioglou, a leftwing union activist from Thessaloniki, arguably illustrates Kouvelas’s point. Marioglou is not a Syriza member, but he voted for the party in January. Six months on, he is furious that Tsipras has abandoned the manifesto he voted for. And yet despite the disappointment, Marioglou still isn’t certain he would vote for anyone who splits from Syriza.
“I don’t agree with the deal,” said Marioglou. “But what should be done? I really don’t know. If the government loses power, who would we vote for? If the left wing of Syriza leaves – those guys?”
At this point, “those guys” may not be the answer either, Marioglou said. “If the deal isn’t voted in, the banks will close, many people will lose their jobs, and 30% are already unemployed,” he said. “The majority of young people will leave for another country. With what will we rebuild the new Greece? With middle-aged people?”
Additional reporting: Vasso Kouidou
