After the initial surprise and doubts, most of the now 25 SYRIZA party MPs have reacted positively to the resignation of their former leader Alexis Tsipras and his push for a broad left-of-center coalition to challenge the ruling conservatives.
In various interviews, the MPs chose to focus on the call for a realignment of the left opposition and not explicitly support any new party that Tsipras might found. Tsipras himself, in his Monday statement announcing his resignation, did not mention a new party, although most pundits agreed that this is his actual goal.
SYRIZA MPs’ statements regarding Tsipras’ move ranged from a careful endorsement to outright enthusiasm. Nikos Pappas, for years considered Tsipras’ closest adviser, even alter ego, said that the ex-premier’s statement “is not at all incompatible with the prospect of a progressive electoral alliance.” MP Alexandros Meikopoulos was less restrained: “Historically, this is the first resignation that has created a huge atmosphere of euphoria, enthusiasm and expectation,” he said Tuesday.
MP and former minister Pavlos Polakis, once considered close to Tsipras, remained one of the few skeptical ones. In a social media posting on Monday, he called Tsipras’ move “SYRIZA’s fifth split” and mocked Tsipras’ phrase of meeting his former comrades again “in lovelier seas.”
A less than charitable interpretation of the day-after wave of enthusiasm is that SYRIZA MPs, aware of the tanking of their party in opinion polls, are trying to secure their political future. Others focused on Tsipras’ call for a unified center-left bloc and said that Tsipras will found a party only if he sees that center-left leaders cannot set aside their “selfishness” as he called it Monday to support a coalition.
SYRIZA MPs should worry about rumors that Tsipras wants his likely new party to contain new faces, free of the baggage of the past. If so, he, with the heaviest baggage of all, would undertake to lead it.
Unless there is a big groundswell of support for Tsipras, the prospects of a progressive alliance look dim. PASOK’s Nikos Androulakis, Course of Freedom’s Zoe Konstantopoulou, and MeRa25’s Yanis Varoufakis view him with uniform hostility and disdain, the latter two as a traitor to the left, and the New Left is split as to how it should respond.
SYRIZA Alexis Tsipras PASOK
