The promise from the left

Alexis Tsipras has walked a long journey from his start as a young Communist activist to his victory yesterday (Jan. 25) in the Greek legislative elections. Now 40, he will become the youngest Greek Prime Minister in 150 years and the hope of an anti-liberal European left.

Although he belongs to no political dynasty — something usual in Greece — the leader of the Syriza coalition was a premature militant. The country discovered him as a representative of a student movement in a television studio in 1990, when, while still a teenager, he stated with the same assurance he displayed yesterday, “We want to have the right to decide when to go to class.”

Since then, the “Greek Bolshevik,” as he is known in the political arena, has preserved his youthful looks, his admiration for Che Guevara (he named one of his children Orfeo Ernesto) and completed his studies at Athens Polytechnic School, where he received his diploma as civil engineer.

Born just days after the fall of the dictatorship, Tsipras made his debut in politics in the Greek Communist Youth (KKE) in the late 1980s. One decade later, he earned his first stripes in the high-school rebellions, when he became active in a liberalizing reform of the educational system, in the early 1990s.

After leaving the Communist Youth, Tsipras joined Synaspismos, a small Euro-communist, new-world party. At the age of 33, he was elected president of that party, which in 2008 became a coalition of several organizations and took the name Syriza. Unlike the Communist Party, the group takes a pro-Europe stance.

In the 2009 elections, Syriza received 4.6 percent of the votes, much below expectations. This was due, according to analysts, to the support it gave to the urban disturbances that rattled Greece after the death of a young man shot by police. Nevertheless, Tsipras obtained a seat in Parliament.

With a 16.78 percent of the vote, the leftist coalition multiplied by four its vote in the 2009 elections and smashed the two-party system that had dominated the country since the fall of the colonels’ regime, in July 1974.

The start of the debt crisis in 2010 and the years of economic disaster that followed gave Syriza and its leader a growing audience. Tsipras denounced the crisis afflicting the Greek people, caused by the austerity measures imposed by the troika formed by the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the European Commission.

In the legislative elections of 2012, Syriza became the country’s second political force and the main opposition party. Tsipras built his party’s success on a rejection of the barbaric measures of the memorandum of agreement signed by Athens and international interlocutors, which conditioned the granting of loans to the implementation of a drastic program of adjustment and structural reforms imposed by the troika.

Today, at the door to power, Tsipras cultivates his international image. Thanks to a growing ability to speak English, he multiplied his trips abroad, visiting the president of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, the German Finance Minister, Wolfgang Schäuble (a rabid defender of budgetary discipline) and Pope Francis.

(From Pagina 12 – Argentina)

(Translate: Progreso Weekly)