Between Things Ended and Things Begun

'We won. I actually don't know how I feel: we've never won before.'

With eyes moistening, retired pharmacist Dimitris Vassos spoke for many of his generation of the left as crowds gathered in the early hours in the centre of Athens to hear Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras make his victory speech. Throughout the night votes coming in from the big cities to the islands inched towards an historic victory for the forces of the left, whose forebears had gone through civil war, exile, exclusion from public life and violence at the hands of the state and of the shadowy forces connecting it to the far right. Under Greece's proportional electoral system the tally of Syriza MPs in the 300-seat parliament started ahead, stayed ahead and crept towards the 151 seat threshold for an absolute majority. It was tantalisingly close. But by the small hours as I sat with friends urging on the total with single-figure vote totals from the most remote hamlets flashing across the screen the final result became clear – 149 seats.

Texts and online messages from friends across Europe seemed more perturbed that the radical left had fallen just two seats short of an absolute majority than any of my long-standing friends in Greece. One Greek journalist colleague, with whom I had shared assignments in the Balkans, remarked with good humour and mock exasperation, 'I hope people abroad realise what has happened here. People died to keep the left alive in Greece. And now we are back, after many obituaries and not a few self-inflicted wounds.' He added, with a wry pause, 'This is the beginning of something ... We'll just have to see what that something is.' Giorgos's was not a cynical affectation. It was a prescient grasp upon the manifold conflicts the election of a government of the left would open up over the next six months.

Syriza, which stands for the Coalition of the Radical Left, was going to form a government. It was the first time in the history of Greece that such a force had won an election and formed an administration under its own name. 'Left' had a distinct meaning in Greece. It is one of those European countries in which the main political party of working-class people for much of the twentieth century was not a Labour-type, social democratic party – as in Britain or Germany – but a Communist Party or, in the case of Syriza, a development out of a once monolithic Communist tradition which had undergone a series of fractures. Left meant of the Communist heritage – that is of the historical tradition which was held by defenders of Western capitalism to be anti-democratic, and therefore rejected by free people in free elections. In any case, it was all meant to have been swept aside a generation ago, when the Berlin Wall came down. Communists had occasionally been in government elsewhere in Western Europe. But, with the exception of Cyprus, it had been as the much junior partner to larger social democratic parties – as in France in the early 1980s. The standard bearer of social democracy – Labour, to use the exceptionally British equivalent term – in Greece was Pasok. It had governed for most of the previous 35 years before crashing to 4.7 per cent on 25 January 2015 – a tenth of the vote it had been used to. That was one indication of the political earthquake which had hit this country of 11 million people, known fondly to most through hazily recalled ancient mythology or equally misty memories of fun holidays, great beaches and cheap drinks. The bitter realities of austerity-wracked Europe over the past decade have provided other images, refracted through a corporate-controlled media. They give some picture of the social disaster which has befallen the country.

As the disaster hit from 2008 onwards, images of suffering served largely as a pretext for blaming the victims. Just as, domestically, the right-wing tabloids in Britain scapegoat the poor, the ill and the marginalised, so they joined the elite chorus across Europe in demonising the people of a whole country. Greeks were lazy, had lied to get into the euro single currency, retired ridiculously early and spent their time sipping their drinks in the sun – all the while avoiding taxes and ripping off foreigners. The scale of tourism to Greece, one of its main earners, perversely provided some apparent evidence for the stereotype. The European elites projected that image of Greece through every media platform in the first half of 2015, as the new government tried to negotiate some relief within the European Union (EU) to crushing austerity. Every aspect of this image of the Greeks was a lie. Time is snatched through the demands and worries of work and monthly bills, which are common to the vast majority of people in the 28 countries of the EU, including Greece. But the experience millions of ordinary Europeans had of the country was of the relaxation, sunshine and the café culture they had enjoyed on their holidays. The more middle-brow 'cheating-Greeks' propaganda – which is what you get from the right-wing broadsheets and so much mainstream broadcasting – echoed two centuries of snobbery among the elites of Britain, Germany and France regarding southern Europe, and Greece in particular. In the grand tours of the European young aristocracy of the nineteenth century the adventurous would go as far as southern Italy. Only the hopelessly drunk or foolhardy would board a ship and head for the bandit lands of Greece. It was, in their imagination, rather eastern.

The identikit politicians of Europe dredged up that historical memory in response to Syriza's election victory. They held to an iron clad consensus that the way out of the deepest and most protracted economic crisis since the 1930s lay in cuts to welfare, slashing wages, rising unemployment and privatisation of remaining public assets. Greece, more than any other European country, had been the laboratory for those policies, bundled together under the dogma of austerity. In response, first came a wave of imaginative and combative movements against aspects of austerity – which included fanning the flames of racism – and the succession of governments which pursued them. Then, in a crescendo rising from 2012 to January 2015, opposition broke through at the ballot box with the election of a left committed to a radical escape from the austerity labyrinth.

The arrogant assertion by Europe's elites that there was no alternative to the policies they were forcing on reluctant voters at home was belied by the ferocity of their response to the democratic choice made by the Greek people. Syriza won the election with a slogan of hope for an alternative path, a break with the austerity years. Offering no alternative paths of their own, the elites' reaction in Greece and elsewhere was fear and hatred. Behind the anti-Greek stereotypes they fell back on lay an instinctive...