Europe’s far right gets the attention, but the left is making the political running
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Version 0 of 1. For Greeks it’s an election that represents a turning point. When they go to the polls next Sunday, they will turn to a young firebrand of the left – anti-establishment, anti-elite, anti-austerity. Alexis Tsipras will become the new national leader at the age of 40. At least, that is now the solid assumption in Brussels and other European capitals, where the start of a new era in Greece – highly volatile, highly unpredictable – is taken as a given. If Tsipras loses, the country’s entire opinion polling industry should retire. There has not been a poll in months predicting victory for the conservative incumbent, Antonis Samaras. EU leaders do not like it. But they are getting used to it. The issue for the Greeks, and for Europe, is not whether Tsipras takes power. Rather it is what he chooses to do with that power. If it is a big election for Greece, it is arguably an even bigger election for Europe, for many reasons. Greece has fundamentally changed Europe. Almost exactly five years ago, in February 2010, Europe’s existential crisis, centred on the survival of the euro, was triggered by the realisation that the country would need to be bailed out – ultimately to the tune of €240bn, the world’s biggest ever financial rescue. In consequence, Europe entered a Berlin-prescribed age of austerity, leading to the current dismal depression – deflation, stagnation, the settled view that there is simply no growth and little prospect of it. Tsipras’s expected triumph highlights less the financial and economic effects of the last five years than the current political impact, illustrating how Europe has changed. Questions that would have been dismissed a few years ago as too far-fetched have become routine. Can the far left take over an EU country? Can a country be kicked out of the euro? Will the union’s third biggest country – Britain – still be a member in five years? Tsipras and his unwieldy Syriza movement are direct products of the crisis. There is plenty of blame to go round regarding the crisis management of the last five years, but in one sense Tsipras was made in Germany. Berlin and Athens remain the two poles of Europe’s fundamental argument, and a Tsipras victory is one answer to that argument that everyone will hear. It will resonate from Helsinki to – most notably – Madrid, where the leftwing insurgents of Podemos (“Yes We Can!”), under Tsipras’s mate, the ponytailed Pablo Iglesias, are hammering on the doors of power. You know there’s a big problem in Europe when the German government indulges its appetite for incendiary leaks to the press. It happened regularly at all the pressure points of the euro crisis, usually at the weekend, usually to Der Spiegel – a tactical unsourced leak which would then be halfheartedly denied by Sunday but set the agenda for the week’s crisis meetings. It happened again a couple of weeks ago, with Der Spiegel reporting that Angela Merkel had let it be known she was sanguine about letting Greece leave the euro if the Greeks turned left. On balance, this appears unlikely. At the height of the crisis, in 2011-12, Merkel made the fundamental decision to keep Greece in the eurozone. It would be surprising if she changed her mind. “Grexit” would create a precedent, smashing the treaty-defined promise that membership of the euro is irreversible. Kicking Greece out now, after all it has been through, would trigger massive resentment against Berlin in other parts of Europe. It would be toxic. But there is no way of knowing how the months of dangerous euro brinkmanship that will follow a Tsipras victory will play out. Europe’s capacity for blundering into bigger trouble cannot be overestimated. There has been much talk in recent years of the challenge posed by the far-right populist movements, with their anti-immigration, anti-EU agenda. But it is the hard left that is poised to make the breakthrough. Created by the crisis, Syriza will the first non-establishment, anti-austerity party to come to power in the eurozone. Podemos in Spain will be hugely encouraged. Beppe Grillo’s anti-euro, increasingly anti-German, Five Star Movement in Italy will rejoice. Sinn Féin and Gerry Adams will be smiling in Ireland. On the other side of the argument, moves in the creditor countries to soften the terms of Greece’s rescue – debt relief or writedown being the most essential and politically trickiest bit – will boost anti-euro activists in Germany, the Netherlands and Finland. And this is election season. Greece’s is a big election, but also only the first of several big ones this year in Europe. The other major ones are in Britain and Spain, although there are many others, from Estonia and Finland to Poland and Portugal. The UK general election in May could decide whether Britain remains in the EU at all. And by the end of the year, Spain may be facing a mainstream meltdown of the bipartisan political system that has governed since the death of Franco. Europe feels besieged – its eastern flank exposed to Vladimir Putin’s rampaging nationalism, the south vulnerable to Middle East mayhem and the migration waves across the Mediterranean – as well as acutely insecure within because of the threat from homegrown terror and jihadism. It will take leadership to steer it to more stable territory. Instead, the road looks rocky. Tsipras represents a new kind of leader, perhaps the first of several. The mainstream elites will cluck and fuss, the machine will grind on. But if Europe is getting the leaders it deserves, no one knows where they will go. |