The Guardian: Golden Dawn: the rise and fall of Greece’s neo-Nazis

Although Golden Dawn’s members sometimes played the game of respectable politics, they were no mere rightwing populists; they were the kind of Nazis you are more likely to read about in history books. Driven by profound racism and antisemitic conspiracy theory, with a fervent devotion to Hitler, Golden Dawn combined street violence with torchlit flag-waving rallies and extreme rhetoric. One of its MPs proclaimed “civil war” to a BBC reporter, while an election candidate promised in front of a documentary crew to “turn on the ovens” and make lampshades from the skins of immigrants, a reference to what Nazi Germany did to Jews, Roma and other minorities in the Holocaust. “The Europe of nations is back,” declared the party’s leader, Nikolaos Michaloliakos, at a press conference in May 2012. “Greece is only the beginning.” [...]

Court hearings will end this spring, and a verdict is due shortly after, but Greece has already started to move on. Golden Dawn was wiped out in last year’s general election, and a new conservative government has declared the years of crisis over. Many media outlets only cover the trial sporadically. According to the centrist political commentator Yannis Palaiologos, Greece now has an opportunity to draw a line under the populism of both left and right. “As the various populist myths about the causes and possible solutions to Greece’s crisis have been revealed as delusions and outright lies,” he wrote in a piece for the Washington Post last year, “the fuel that sustained extremism has been depleted.” [...]

Golden Dawn was founded in the early 80s, initially as a Masonic society, according to the investigative journalist Dimitris Psarras, an authority on the party. For many years it remained small and semi-hidden, recruiting its members from Greece’s football hooligan scene. In the late 00s, however, it pursued a new strategy, setting up an “angry citizens” group in Saint Pantaleimon to complain about crime it linked to immigrants, mainly refugees from Afghanistan, who had recently moved into the area. Many lived in poverty or destitution, trapped by a Greek asylum system that didn’t work and an EU regulation that would not let them travel elsewhere, but a community was starting to put down roots; some Afghans had opened shops and cafes on the square. [...]

The country’s political and media class was split over how to treat Golden Dawn, since Greece’s constitution does not allow for the banning of political parties. In late 2013, when parliament voted to suspend the party’s state election funding and waive its MPs’ immunity from prosecution, the move was opposed by a minority of leftwingers, one of whom argued that Golden Dawn was “not a classic Nazi party”, since it set itself in opposition to “the dominant bourgeois forces”. In 2014, several defence lawyers for Golden Dawn members who were under investigation appeared on a TV chat show to argue that while they didn’t support the party’s views, they were doing their jobs in the interest of democracy and free speech.

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UnHerd: Can Corbyn learn from the Greek tragedy?

For me, however, there are positives to take away that have implications for the entire project of the global Left. First, Tsipras showed that with a clear narrative, a message of hope and some competent advisers, the far-Left’s project can work in government. The oligarchy, whose two-party system (Pasok and New Democracy) collapsed, expected Syriza to be amateurs: in fact they brought professionalism and openness to an endemically corrupt and chaotic state.

Second, by being radical in opposition, and refusing to give up radicalism even when forced into retreat, Syriza and the wider Greek Left defeated one of the most violent and open fascist threats in the European continent. Its conservative predecessors had tolerated Golden Dawn’s infiltration of the police, and murderous violence on the streets. Without a Left prepared to risk taking power, Greece would have degenerated into a battleground of populisms. [...]

But the political forces emerging out of the 20thcentury Left face two new challenges: the so-called Green Wave, which has swelled the electoral support of Green parties everywhere; and a growing electoral threat from far right or overtly racist parties, some of which are building support among the working class communities where the Left used to be strong. [...]

In future, Left-wing parties will need to look and sound like they care about the planet more than anything else – and the truth is, our tradition has not always done so. The closer you remain to the traditional working class communities which prospered during the carbon era, the harder it is to walk the walk when it comes to zero carbon.

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UnHerd: The heat is on for Greece

The election marks the first time Greeks will go to the polls since the height of the financial crisis in 2015. This was when fears that the country might tumble out of the Eurozone, and – though an unlikely scenario – the European Union, caused political and financial tremors from Brussels to Washington. [...]

The domestic implications of this are clear. As journalist Yiannis Baboulias, tells me: “Politically, Greece has moved from the anti-austerity financial-based narratives and conflict of the past decade to a political space in which culture wars now dominate.” [...]

Now, New Democracy has continued the populist trend, but from the other extreme, with a scattergun deployment of hard-Right tropes regarding migrants and LGBTQ issues. And as far as they are concerned, Syriza are hardcore communists who will turn Greece into Venezuela.[...]

But most alarming of all is New Democracy’s virulent opposition to the June 2018 Prespa Agreement – the treaty that saw North Macedonia change its name in return for Greece dropping objections to the country’s NATO accession.

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The Atlantic: Greek Elections Close a Chapter, but Not in Europe

Here in Greece, a cycle is ending, and the country is returning to political normality and stability. On Sunday, it will hold national elections—its first since exiting a bailout regime last year—in which Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s center-right New Democracy party, a pillar of Greece’s pre-bailout establishment, is expected to defeat the left-wing populist Syriza party, led by Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras. Syriza came to power in 2015 demanding an end to the crippling austerity Greece was forced to undertake as a condition of its bailout, but ended up having to implement it anyway—at the behest of the European Union and the country’s other creditors. [...]

In Italy, for instance, few days go by without Matteo Salvini, the country’s right-wing populist interior minister and the man widely seen as a leader-in-waiting, saying that Italy doesn’t want to “meet the same fate as Greece.” In Salvini’s rhetoric, winding up like Greece means ceding national sovereignty to the baddies of the European Union, who in turn would impose an emasculating austerity regime on Italy. His party has long flirted with the idea of exiting the euro, or even creating temporary IOUs as a parallel currency—a notion that fires up the base, but is not likely to happen because it’s illegal and would cause the single currency to collapse. [...]

Europe’s handling of the Greek debt crisis also haunted talks last month about creating a common European budget for handling moments of extreme financial stress, something French President Emmanuel Macron has been pushing for, but which Germany opposes. That’s because in much of the German political and popular imagination, Greece has been the ultimate example of a spendthrift country whose soaring debts got it into trouble and that required the thrifty creditor Germany to solve its problems; never mind that for years before the crisis, Germany benefited from Greece buying German goods with money borrowed from German banks.

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Jacobin Magazine: Syriza’s Failure Has Hurt Us All

Added to this, a closer analysis shows that the Syriza electorate in 2019 in fact bears little relation with the voters who first put it in government in 2015. Admittedly, given the lack of any credible alternative on the Left (in the broadest sense) of the political spectrum, it has not collapsed entirely. That’s the big difference with what happened to Pasok in 2012, after its own implementation of austerity measures. [...]

In generational terms, it has lost nearly half its support among younger voters (17 to 24 year-olds) but has shed only 4 percent backing among the over 65s. From an electorate polarized around wage-earners and the youth, it is now a party with a nearly uniform average score among most social strata and age classes (around 20 percent) and is ahead of New Democracy only among the unemployed. The “qualitative” profile of its electorate has undergone an even more dramatic change. A look at the choice Syriza voters made among its candidates for the European Parliament is instructive in this regard. [...]

Syriza’s electorate today looks less like the popular base of a left-wing party than the “de-ideologized” clientelist support of a party of government. It is moreover obvious that it is in part the heir to the “social-liberal” Pasok of the 2000s. Syriza came first in just four constituencies nationally, and of these, three were among PASOK’s historic symbolic bastions: two in Crete and one in the northwestern Peloponnese, around the city of Patras, cradle of that party’s long-dominant Papandreou family.

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The Guardian: Tsipras faces fight to stay in power after EU elections mauling Inbox x

After suffering an unexpectedly heavy defeat at home, Tsipras’s Syriza party was also resoundingly rebuffed by diaspora Greeks, it emerged on Thursday. With 100% of the vote counted, the country’s interior ministry reported that 33.9% had cast ballots in favour of the centre-right New Democracy party in contrast to 15.3% for Syriza. [...]

Asked why the electorate seemed bent on punishing the ruling party he responded: “It’s a little bit of everything; what has happened to the middle class, the [strictures of] bailout oversight, their style in power, a know-all approach and general over-assuredness.”

Diaspora Greeks from America to Australia, who also participated in the European poll, are believed to have been particularly negatively swayed by perceived concessions over Macedonia: in exchange for the neighbouring country agreeing to change its name, the leftist government recognised a Macedonian language and ethnicity which has left many enraged. Although applauded internationally, the name-change deal was aggressively derided by the conservatives as part of concerted efforts to appeal to nationalist voters globally. [...]

“One of the biggest reasons for Syriza’s defeat is the middle class,” said Kaki Balli, editor of the Sunday Avgi paper which reflects Syriza’s views. “Greece, unlike other European countries, has always had a lot of class mobility. Given that every Greek wants to belong to the middle class they have been lured by the promise of less taxation and those are promises that New Democracy is making.”

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Social Europe: Why Alexis Tsipras is still not a social democrat

Recently, Alexis Tsipras, Greece’s prime minister and leader of the populist left-wing SYRIZA, which forms a coalition with the right-wing populist ANEL (Independent Greeks) party, has been trying to approach European social democratic leaders in a strategy of opening up to centre-left forces. Indeed, the transformation of Tsipras, from a political leader who criticized the European Union, the “old” parties, including the social democrats, and the Troika (IMF, ECB, EC), to a prime minister who agreed and implemented the third memorandum of understanding in Greece with absolute prudence and agreement with the lenders, constitutes an interesting case study. But this shift should come as no surprise. The reason is specific and related to the very notion of populism; it also tells us whether Tsipras is a social democrat or not. [...]

Apart from cynicism, the radical left-right coalition government is also distinguished by another populist feature: “liberal authoritarian” leadership that undermines democratic institutions such as the rule of law. On the one hand, the government has criticized the independent judiciary for judging certain executive acts as unconstitutional, such as the proposed law on national channels – whose main aim was to reduce pluralism – that limited the licenses to four while the digital broadcasting system could emit more than ten. The restriction of pluralism was precisely the goal of a government that was finally reined back by judicial forces. The attack on the institutions of justice and the media continues even today and undermines the rule of law and democracy itself. [...]

EU social democratic decision-makers may consider that the imminent rescue of a minimum number of MEPs via the participation of SYRIZA members could be a solution to the prolonged crisis in social democratic political identity. But this means the legitimization of social democracy as such only through numbers and not the elaboration of values-based policies. It is more a process of echoing Tsipras’s populist discourse rather than undergoing a radical injection of progressive social values. Social democracy can only overcome its crisis through working towards humanizing socio-economic reality rather than accepting a populist discourse tied to the personal aspirations of one “politician”. Thus, this leader and his party still do not have any real relation with social democracy and its values, and consequently, a possible affiliation can only be dangerous for the latter.

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Al Jazeera: Greek PM Tsipras survives no confidence vote over Macedonia deal

The coalition's junior partner - the Independent Greeks (ANEL), a right-wing party - says it opposes the deal but only one of its MPs backed the censure motion in parliament. Panos Kammenos, leader of ANEL and defence minister, subsequently kicked the lawmaker out of the party.

The motion was brought by the conservative New Democracy party which accused the government of making too many concessions over the agreement which will eventually see the small country -  which declared independence from Yugoslavia in 1991 - renamed the Republic of North Macedonia. [...]

"It not only includes a compound name with a geographic qualifier, used erga omnes, but also sets as a condition a change of the constitutional name by which the country has been recognised by 140 countries. It includes a constitutional change to eradicate every irredentist term in their constitution," Tsipras pointed out. [...]

In Skopje, there has also been a heavy backlash against the agreement, with the president declaring his refusal to sign off on the deal. The agreement must clear the hurdles of parliamentary ratification, a referendum in September and a constitutional amendment. 

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Al Jazeera: Calls for coup, firing squads: Greek far right angry at name deal

Nikos Voutsis, a member of the ruling Syriza party and president of the Greek parliament, on Friday called for an emergency meeting to temporarily ban the neo-fascist Golden Dawn party from parliament.  [...]

"The extremists of Golden Dawn are threatening democracy and threatening their political adversaries, saying that they want their heads," Kiritsis told Al Jazeera, explaining that Barbarousis's remarks are part of a broader wave of far-right "incitement to violence". [...]

On Wednesday, Ilias Zagoreos, the head of Athens's First-Instance Prosecutor's office, ordered the investigation into potential incitement to commit a crime and other infractions by a right-wing tabloid.

The move came after the tabloid, Makeleio, published an edition with a front-page image depicting the prime minister, president and foreign minister being executed by a firing squad for supposedly "selling out" Greece's exclusive right to the name 'Macedonia'.  

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The New York Review of Books: Italy: The Bright Side of Populism?

Europe has gone through two major crises in the past decade: the refugee crisis and the euro crisis. Both remain essentially unresolved, but have already profoundly changed the political geography of the continent. The refugee crisis proved to be a boon for right-wing populists in the northern countries; the euro crisis resulted in a revolt against austerity measures prescribed to save the EU’s single currency and eventually led to a surge of left-wing populism in the south. [...]

The FSM in Italy and the radical-left Podemos in Spain are often described as mobilizations of angry citizens, especially the young, in the wake of the international financial crisis of 2008–2009 and the austerity measures imposed on southern countries during the euro crisis that followed. Both groups promote themselves as movements, rather than traditional parties (which Beppe Grillo, the founder of the FSM, has declared “evil”). Both benefit from being associated with ideals of direct democracy, in particular, a system of continuous online participation in decision-making as opposed to delegating power to professionals in parties. This story, “from the barricades to the blogs to the ballot box,” is a little deceptive, though. In Spain, the great popular protests against “politics as usual” took place in 2011, yet Podemos (literally, “We can”) was not formed until 2014. Its founders were political scientists who thought the main lesson from the protests in public squares was that the received ideas of the left no longer resonated with citizens. Instead of left-right, they held, the main political divide should be la casta—the caste of professional politicians—versus el pueblo, or simply: arriba versus abajo (above versus below; or, also, a colorful metaphor promoted by the professors: the elites as cats and the people as mice). Podemos’s instigators even concluded, “If you want to get it right, don’t do what the left would do”—though their actual policy ideas about housing and employment, for instance, were often close to what traditional Social Democrats would have offered.   [...]

Here, though, the stories of the new parties of southern Europe start to diverge. Podemos has failed by its own standards: its leaders described themselves as “artisans with words,” but the new political language they crafted has not, in fact, displaced the traditional discourse of left and right. Podemos has also not succeeded in overtaking Spain’s established Socialist Party in elections. On June 1, Podemos helped bring to power a Socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, after the government of the conservative Mariano Rajoy fell because of major corruption scandals. Podemos has become an all-too-normal looking parliamentary party. It even has its own scandals: Iglesias and his partner, Irene Montero, who is Podemos’s spokesperson in parliament, were recently revealed to have acquired a fancy villa outside Madrid; facing internal criticism, the couple held a plebiscite on whether they should stay in office (which they won by two-thirds of the vote). As far back as 2016, one of the early leaders of the partido de profesores, Juan Carlos Monedero, broke ranks to express the view that the populist “Podemos hypothesis” had failed to realize its aspirations of fundamentally remaking Spanish politics. The mice are doing better, one might say, but they haven’t outwitted the cats.  [...]

What makes the contradiction here less glaring is that technocracy and populism, rather than being complete opposites, actually resemble each other in one respect: the technocrat proposes that there is a single rational solution to any policy problem; the populist claims to speak on behalf of the one authentic will of the people, which cannot fail to represent the common good. Put the two together and you get something like the paradox of the current Italian government: two university dropouts—Matteo Salvini and Luigi Di Maio, leaders of the League and the FSM, respectively, who have lived their entire lives for, in, and off politics—championing the people while putting nominally apolitical, highly-educated experts in charge of important ministries.

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The Atlantic: Two Ways to Read Italy's Election Results

The people have spoken. But what are they saying? There are two main ways to read the results, and both have major consequences for Europe. One—and this is entirely new—is that one of the three pillar countries of the European Union now effectively has a euroskeptical majority in parliament; both Five Star and the League have called for rewriting treaties with Europe to give Italy more sovereignty. (Although it’s a big question whether they would team up to form a government; the election results have produced a hung parliament.) The second is that voters are punishing Italy’s governing elites—Renzi’s Democratic Party, but also Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party—for overseeing the country’s decline.

The results of the vote fundamentally alter Italy’s relationship to the European Union. Five Star and the League haven’t called for an Ital-exit per se, but a loosening of ties that they say have held Italy back. How they’ll accomplish this is anyone’s guess. In a victory speech on Monday, Matteo Salvini, the head of the League—which he transformed from a Northern sovereigntist party into a national one by campaigning on a platform of “Italians first”—said he wanted a “different” kind of Europe, one that gives more power to national interests over pan-European commitments. He praised Hungary’s Viktor Orban, who is famous for his authoritarian bent and for advocating what he has called “illiberal” democracy, and who has pushed back taking in refugees from the Middle East. He also thanked France’s Marine Le Pen for her support and friendship. But he shares some of Le Pen’s contradictions—like her, he is a euroskeptic who has served in the European Parliament; like her, he has said the European Union is a suffocating oppressor, while wanting lots of European Union agricultural subsidies for the farmers that form a key constituency. [...]

In this, the results resemble less Brexit and Trump than the rise of the left-wing Syriza party in Greece, which came to power when the centrist parties were seen as corrupt and complicit in bankrupting the country. Nor did Renzi do himself any favors. In Italy, Di Maio is mocked for making grammar mistakes, especially with the subjunctive mood, used for hypotheticals. Renzi seems to have the opposite problem. He uses the subjunctive too much. In his speech Monday, when he said he’d eventually step down, he barely conceded any errors and instead talked about how Italy should have held elections last year, riding the currents that helped defeat Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and elect Emmanuel Macron in France.

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The New York Review of Books: A Modern Greek Tragedy

If one asks European officials, the consensus is harsh: Varoufakis was a self-aggrandizing time waster who helped ruin the Greek economy before Tsipras got rid of him. The hard-edged intellectuals of Popular Unity agree that Varoufakis was as much a part of the problem as he was a part of the solution. They also agree that it was a mistake for Syriza to have haggled with the eurozone creditors. Their preferred option was for Syriza to have broken with the creditors from the beginning.2 A “rupture,” an exit from the eurozone, in January or February 2015 might have sustained the momentum of Syriza’s election victory. [...]

To understand Varoufakis’s motivations, we have to understand how he defines what was at stake in the battle between Greece and its creditors. For many on the left, the struggle was between the “forces of capital” and democracy. That made a good rallying cry. But it is far from the situation that Syriza actually confronted in 2015. Due to the 2012 debt write-down, when Syriza took power three years later only 15 percent of Greece’s debts were owed to banks, insurance funds, or hedge funds. Eighty-five percent were debts to official agencies and other European governments. The struggle was not with the capital markets but with official creditors and the other national governments assembled in the Eurogroup. [...]

By buying sovereign and private bonds, the ECB propped up their prices, pushed interest rates down, and flushed hundreds of billions in euro liquidity into the financial system. The primary aim was to stimulate the eurozone economy, but quantitative easing also had political ramifications. As long as the ECB kept buying their bonds, Spain, Italy, and Portugal were immune to contagion from the uncertainty surrounding Greece. Quantitative easing thus deprived Syriza of one of its chief bargaining weapons. Ironically, it was the ECB’s action—made in defiance of the conservatives in the Eurogroup—that freed those conservatives to lay siege to the left-wing government in Athens. They could force Greece to the brink of a disorderly Grexit without fear of destabilizing the rest of the eurozone and fight Greece’s political contagion without having to worry about the financial kind.

At the height of the crisis—between 2010 and 2012—there was indeed a spectacular confusion in the eurozone that might have been resolved by means of a grand bargain. But even then, the idea that the solution could have come from Greece was fanciful. In 2012, it took the combined weight of France, Italy, Spain, the European Central Bank, the European Commission, and the Obama administration to convince Germany to accept the ECB’s commitment to do “whatever it takes” to save the eurozone. What emerged in the aftermath of that crisis was neither a muddle—as Varoufakis suggests—nor a conspiracy. Europe’s political economy came to be dominated by the “reform” project first launched by Germany’s main political parties in the early 2000s, which centered on labor market liberalization and fiscal consolidation.

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Social Europe: The Crisis Of (Nordic) Social Democracy

The once-dominant role and current crisis of social democracy in much of Europe in the last century can hardly be understood without analysing the shift from confrontation to compromise in the relationship between the trade union and labour movement and the employers/right-wing forces. This historical compromise between labour and capital was the result of comprehensive class struggles that shifted the balance of power in favour of labour. Employers viewed such a compromise as a tactical step in order to dampen and counteract the radicalism of a strong and growing trade union movement. In Norway it was formalized through the first Collective Basic Agreement between the Norwegian Confederation of Trade Unions (LO in Norwegian) and the Norwegian Employers’ Association in 1935. That same year the Labour Party, with support from the Peasants’ Party, won government power for the first time.

Based on this compromise, the foundation was laid for the golden age of social democracy. It was a real compromise, where employers eventually had to give a number of concessions to the trade union and labour movement – including the acceptance of major political interventions in the market. Thus, the basis was laid for great social progress for workers. The welfare state developed. The Norwegian, or Nordic, model came into being. [...]

It is therefore not only the crisis of social democracy we are experiencing but that of the compromise-based post-war political model in Europe. In the first phase of this political crisis, new far right parties emerged – viz. Front National in France, the so-called freedom parties in Austria and the Netherlands, and the Progress Party in Norway. The lack of any alternative policy from social democratic and left-wing parties means they must take their share of responsibility for this development. They had no policy to take on the neoliberalist attacks on the social gains that had been won through the welfare state. In recent years, however, we have seen that new political alternatives have started to grow also on the left (Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, Momentum in the UK, and the newly established Power to the People in Italy). These are young and incomplete initiatives, which can fail (like Syriza) or succeed, but in any case will further develop through struggles and experiences, victories and defeats.

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Al Jazeera: Tens of thousands of Greeks protest Macedonia's name

Hundreds of busses transported demonstrators from across the country for the "Macedonia is Greek" demonstration. Tens of thousands assembled in the city centre with organisers claiming more than one million people would take to the streets. [...]

The demonstration comes two weeks after an estimated 300,000 people gathered in the northern coastal city of Thessaloniki to voice their opposition to the negotiations. [...]

As that rally came to a close, anarchist counter-demonstrators clashed with police, and far-right protesters lit an anarchist squat on fire.

Assailants later vandalised a Holocaust monument.  [...]

In Skopje, former prime minister Nikola Gruevski oversaw a programme to erect statues of Alexander the Great, and name highways, buildings, sports venues and the country's international airport after Greece's historical heroes.

Current Prime Minister Zoran Zaev has expressed his willingness to rename the sites and bring down the monuments that have sparked outrage in Greece. [...]

For its part, Golden Dawn leaders have accused the Syriza-led government of national betrayal. On Saturday night, party leader Nikolaos Michaloliakos urged a crowd of 600 supporters to topple "the anti-Greek government".

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Jacobin Magazine: The Dynamics of Retreat

Following the labor upsurge and radicalization that came in the wake of World War I, workers’ militancy tailed off, and the 1920s saw the American capitalist class at the peak of its power, confidence, and productiveness, in total command of industry and politics. Manufacturing productivity rose more rapidly during this decade than ever before or since, the open shop (which banned union contracts) prevailed everywhere, the Republican Party of big business reigned supreme, and the stock market broke all records. [...]

What transformed the political landscape beyond recognition was the outbreak of what Rosa Luxemburg would have called a “mass strike upsurge,” a phenomenon she had witnessed and analyzed at the time of the 1905 revolution in Russia and the accompanying wave of mass strikes. Out of the blue, starting in Detroit auto plants in spring 1933, you got a series of ever larger and more encompassing strikes, mobilizing ever broader groups of workers on the shop floor and the streets — organized and unorganized, employed and unemployed, in an ascending wave. Programmatic demands and ideas that seemed pie in the sky were now, with the increase in workers power, plausible and actionable. [...]

Equally important, the smashing victories in the 1934 strikes endowed the nascent radical-led labor movement with the confidence and capacity to organize the United Auto Workers (UAW) and the CIO over the next three years. Roosevelt was transformed from a standard politician into a reformer, the carrot and stick of the new labor movement inducing the administration to advocate a series of historic sociopolitical reforms that included the Social Security Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act (which set maximum hours and minimum wages for most workers), and the Wagner Act (which extended union recognition and set up routinized collective bargaining). [...]

To put the point in a more general way, an electoral strategy of voting for a third party could never be sustained, as the right-wing party would typically win greater electoral majorities as the third party increased its vote share. Only if the third party could achieve a majority all at once, perhaps on the back of a titanic mass movement that brought about a sudden lurch to the left among a large section of the citizenry, would it have a chance of succeeding. Otherwise, dull electoral calculation ensures the hegemony of the two-party monopoly.

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Jacobin Magazine: The Many Lives of François Mitterrand

Mitterrand’s origins lay not on the far left, but in the more moderate corners of French republican socialism. An inveterate opportunist, his commitment to principle went only so far as his political ambitions would allow. And yet the future president had moved progressively leftward over the course of his life — from his youthful exploits as a supporter of the collaborationist Vichy regime, through his conversion to the Resistance left, to his days as a moderate socialist minister in the short-lived cabinets of the 1950s, to his failed 1965 and 1974 presidential runs, and finally his entrance into the PS in 1971.  [...]

Mitterrand’s activities as a cabinet minister during these years were most notable for his involvement in the repression of the movement for Algerian independence. Early in the decade, Mitterrand had made his feelings on Algerian independence clear, when he had proclaimed, “Algeria, that’s France.” As Justice Minister under Mollet, he ordered the extension of martial law and recommended the death sentence forty-five times. [...]

The radicalism of Mitterrand’s 1980 electoral program embodied the fruits of this trajectory. But it also reflected the influence of a changing political context, in France and in Europe, during the 1970s. Thus, on the one hand it reflected the Socialists’ desire to compete with the Communist Party (PCF), traditionally the hegemonic force on the French far left, for votes and influence, as well as the impact of France’s growing economic difficulties in national political debates. [...]

But either way, the French case illustrates an important point for socialists to remember: the political power of the capitalist class flows not just from what capital can do, but from what it can choose not to do — invest. It is its control over the investment function, not its collective organizations, that is the key source of capitalists’ power in the political sphere: since, in a capitalist economy, investment is the prerequisite for growth, employment, and tax revenue, policymakers will always have an incentive to prioritize the demands of business confidence over all other considerations.

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Political Critique: Corbyn can kick off a revolution among Europe’s political elites – an interview with Michael Hartmann

How many people make up the elite of a country? 

About 2000 people.

How accessible is the elite?

It really depends on which elite-branch and country we are talking about. For instance, in Germany, 75% of the chief economic officers who are part of the economic elite stem from the richest 4% of the population. Among German political elites, on the other hand, the figure drops down to 50%. In France the numbers are slightly different and rise to 90 and 60%, respectively. This implies, on the one hand, that the economic elite is more exclusive than the political one, generally speaking. On the other hand, it tells us that France has more “exclusive” features compared with Germany. [...]

We observed the last significant turn within elites when Thatcher took power in the UK. More specifically, at that time within the British Conservative Party the neoliberal paradigm gained traction. The transition was accompanied by a fully fledged shift in the composition of the Government’s staff. If, before Thatcher, the Labour government featured 30% of people stemming from the upper bourgeoisie, that same number reached the staggering proportion of 80%. From an ideological point of view, all other European countries subsequently followed that paradigm shift. [...]

Brexit is a symptom of the poor cohesion within the British economic elite. If compared to other economic elites in Europe, the former is the only one that has undergone a massive process of internationalisation. This dynamic created a gap between the economic elite and the conservative political ruling class. [...]

First of all, it makes no sense to talk about a crisis within Die Linke. Secondarily, the point is that the left has to live with a substantial mutation of its electorate. Leftist parties attract young people with high levels of education, not the victims of the economic system. This truth holds for anyone: Die Linke, Sanders in the US, or Corbyn in the UK. And it creates disruptions.

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Social Europe: Pasok: New Leadership, New Discourse To Revive Greek Social Democracy

Even worse, in the 2015 elections when Syriza, the leftist party, won power there were two elections in six months. PASOK did very badly: 4.6% in the first and 6.28% in the latest elections. There we had the really downward route. From 44% we came back first to 13%, which incidentally is the start of the rot.

Now PASOK scores in single digits. It even went down to less than 5%. At that point, it was the seventh party in the Greek Parliament after always being the first or the second. Now it’s the fourth party in the Greek Parliament with 6.28%. It’s been a steep decline electorally since 2012.

I think that the main reasons for the decline have to do with two linked factors. The first is that PASOK has been for 30 years almost continuously in power or in a position to be the first or second party, so very much involved in decision making in Greece. This has taken its toll. But most importantly, this has taken the biggest psychological toll. Then it got translated into electoral terms with the advent of the crisis because for good or less good reasons it was perceived as responsible. Not immediately because it must be noted that the crisis in Greece only really began in 2009. [...]

It’s not only the personalities that are going to change. The main thing is that in light of the crisis, in light of the more general problem also of the European social democracy, there’s a big effort to change the propositions, the discourse, the main attributes of these parties. That’s the way the reconnection is perceived. Also through, as you know, the classical social democratic way of winning mayoralities in some towns, by using local connections, by trying to be more vocal in parliament etc. But the main thing is the new leadership, the new image of rejuvenation of the party and the new political discourse of this party.

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Social Europe: No More Crises As Opportunities: An Answer To Yanis Varoufakis

The concept of crises engendering opportunities for the “rebirth” of Europe should have died with the Greek experience in the most dramatic phase of which Yanis Varoufakis took an active part. Having worked with former Prime Minister George Papandreou before embarking on his “radical Left” experiment, which nearly cost Greece its place in the Eurozone, Varoufakis should have learned that courting the abyss and generating crises is never a good way to change what needs to be changed. [...]

Varoufakis uses the Catalan crisis as a mere illustration for his favorite topic, which he espoused after he quit the Syriza government and denounced its policies: the reconfiguration of the European Union with “radical” changes like “fiscal autonomy”. He now has another radical idea: fostering regional governance (that’s where Catalonia comes in handy) and even creating a “Code of Conduct for secession”, facilitating regions all over Europe (why should one stop in Spain?) to become autonomous. This is presented as a progressive idea. In fact it is, to my eyes, both a misrepresentation of reality and a rallying call for nationalism, which, for all non-radical socialists, and a majority of democrats, constitutes the opposite of progressiveness.

The Catalan question flared up not on the basis of the economic situation in Spain but because of a combination of political mismanagement, or pure populism, by both sides of the conflict. The right-wing government of Mr. Rajoy challenged the special regime for Catalonia established under the socialist government of Mr. Zapatero, tolerated then disparaged a first referendum on independence, never treated the Catalan government as equal, constantly sought legal remedies to political and societal issues and opted for repression where it should have opted for dialogue. Still independence is at best a 50-50 option for the Catalan people and not an inescapable conclusion. On the other hand, the current Catalan government has been elected on an “independentist” agenda, but it overplayed its hand and misjudged both the Spanish environment (although it provides about 20% of Spanish output, Catalonia is only one of 17 regions) and the European drive for unity and integration. [...]

“Regionalization” is not the answer, nor do we need a crisis as dramatic as Catalonia’s to understand this. Regionalism is already a part of the European project – Varoufakis gets the relationship between Spain’s central government and Catalonia’s regional government or Barcelona’s City Hall completely wrong and of course there could be no such thing as a “secession (of rich regions like Veneto or Catalonia) with an obligation to maintain fiscal transfers” (to the poorer regions), since the main reason for secession would be to stop paying for others. From both a political and a legal point of view it is obvious that the EU framework allows for many types of regional settlement (ranging from advanced autonomy to federalism) other than separatism. The non-negotiable and unilateral “secession” of Catalonia evokes the populist themes of Brexit much more than the nuances of a regionalist settlement.

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Al Jazeera: Greece and economic recovery: Fake news in action

Indeed, now into its eighth year, Greece remains entirely dependent on international bailouts (three bailouts involving the European Union and the International Monetary Fund have been arranged since 2010), has lost a quarter of its GDP with no realistic expectations of recovering it for decades to come, experiences unemployment levels which have oscillated between a high 27.8 percent (in July 2013) and a low 21.2 percent (in June 2017), and has seen the standard of living decline to 1960s levels.

Worse, Greece's debt-to-GDP ratio has exploded since the start of the bailout programs, rising from 128 percent in 2010 to over 185 percent in 2017, and, with no debt relief in sight, the small Mediterranean nation has become truly a permanent debt colony inside the world's richest region. In the meantime, a mass exodus of young and educated people has been in motion for several years now (youth unemployment rate in Greece stands currently at 43.3 percent), a process that is bound to have long-term effects on demographic trends and a significant impact on future economic developments. [...]

First, the actual facts about the broken promises and the continuous lies of and the dissemination of fake news by the Syriza government. For starters, not only did Alexis Tsipras deceive the Greek people by winning the popular vote with passionate pleas that, if elected, he would do away with international bailouts, secure a debt write-off, and put an end to the vicious cycle of debt-austerity-recession-unemployment, but ended up signing a third bailout agreement with the country's international creditors and has even consented to the enforcement of Procrustean economics, which entail additional cuts in excess of five billion euros (about $6bn), even deeper pension reductions, and the attainment of outrageously high primary surplus targets - well into 2020. 

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