Tariq Ali: Today we’re going to discuss the situation in Greece. I’m here now with Stathis Kouvelakis. If, in three days time, the Syriza party wins the elections, it will be the first big break in Europe with austerity politics and with neoliberalism. So a great deal is riding on this election. And it’s taken a long time to reach this stage. Very briefly, the history of Greece since the Second World War has been very tormented. A huge civil war that took place both during the German occupation and carried on afterwards with the Western powers largely Churchill and Britain backing the right and the extreme right in Greece and the Russians – the Soviet Union as it was then – effectively refusing to back the Greek resistance, on the left because a deal had been struck at Yalta.

The civil war was won by the right and the extreme right in Greece and it has dominated Greek politics for longer than people imagine. That the politics of that period dominated Greece during the Cold War, when it appeared in the 60s that a moderate centre party of the left, the left centre, might win the elections, the United States and NATO organised a coup d’état, and the military ruled Greece for several years after that. A brutal period in Greek history, tortures, expulsions, people leaving the country and going into exile. And when this finally ended there was a great deal of hope that the party would now come to power and transform Greece. Well, they did come to power but they didn’t transform Greece and so the crisis continued. The question arose after the 2008 Wall Street crash, what was going to happen to countries like Greece, Spain and Italy who were being crushed? The attempt by the European Union and the Troika to impose austerity has now failed.

This is why already in 2012 Syriza had become the largest party on the left and was threatening to challenge and take over from the extreme centre parties, the Conservatives and the so-called left party, PASOK. They got close to winning the 2012 elections but a campaign of intimidation and fear was so fierce that especially in the countryside and amongst older people, they were frightened off. Since 2012 the mood has changed because the conservative government in power, backed by its allies in parliament, has failed miserably. Greece is in a mess. Unemployment is high, unemployed people can’t be paid benefits, there are food shortages because people cannot afford to buy the food that is available in many of the shops, barter has existed in this country, so change is now expected. And because the right and its allies have failed, the tune of the Western media, too, has changed. The January 19th New York Times headline is, “An appeal to populism could pay off in Greece.”

Stathis, let’s start with this New York Times headline. What is the meaning of the word populism, why do they use it?

Stathis Kouvelakis: Populism is just the name of the big “other” of mainstream politics. Everything that is considered alien to mainstream politics is characterised as populism. So it’s a category that amalgamates, the far right, xenophobic, nationalist parties and also parties that reject the new liberal dogma. And this is the case of Syriza. The difference is that Syriza is the party of the left but it is a party of the left that has fought against neoliberalism. The crucial stake of the party before even the crisis in the 2000’s, in its internal debate and confrontation was the rejection of the strategy of an alliance of a centre-left type because that has been the great trap in which many forces and parties of the alternative left have fallen into in recent decades, most specifically in France with the communist party but also in Italy where the very promising Rifondazione Comunista experiment miserably failed when they enter the Prodi government. So, Syriza had sorted that out positively before even the crisis and that is, I think, the starting point for its capacity to become a credible alternative in the situation created by that very violent crisis and shock austerity promises that have been imposed.

Tariq Ali: Let’s assume that Syriza wins. They win the election and then what?

Stathis Kouvelakis: Syriza is at the case of power. I mean most opinion polls but also the atmosphere in Greece predict a victory of Syriza. The only thing that we do not know yet is how large this victory will be. And this is a crucial parameter, of course, or the situation, the issue of the parliamentary majority, more specifically. But Syriza comes to power with a very clear mandate, which is, in a way, the outcome of the situation itself. And this mandate can be summed up in three basic points. First of all, liberate the country from the burden of that unsustainable and completely absurd debt. Second, make a break with austerity politics, with all the mechanisms of the memoranda. And third, restore democracy. Because the memoranda and the specific way those new liberal policies have been imposed on Greece meant that democracy itself has been destroyed. Any notion of popular and national sovereignty is simply non-existent. The parliamentary institutions have become just a facade behind which, you know, the governments have been just the executors of what had been decided by the Troika. All the functioning of the state apparatus is constantly monitored by the Troika and the evolution of the situation meant that a very authoritarian state apparatus came and was produced by the situation. So we need to break with that authoritarianism which has penetrated deeply into the state but also into Greek society itself. So this is the mandate of Syriza, that is its mission.

Tariq Ali: The implementation is not going to be as easy as some people imagine because the pressures that will come from the European Union, the Troika, principally the German government, the German banking elite are going to make it difficult to negotiate a settlement that favours the Greek people. It may happen, we can’t exclude it. The question is: what, if the negotiations with the institutions of the European Union fail, what is Syriza going to do? It has pledged to demolish the debt, or to negotiate their way out of it like the Argentinians did, probably. But what if, if the conditions are still unfavourable?

Stathis Kouvelakis: Well, the issue of Syriza is that we don’t want to move unilaterally on the issue of the debt except if we are forced unilaterally. And I think that’s the only sensible solution. We have to be clear about one thing. The so-called bailouts of Greece were absolutely not money that went to the Greek economy or to the Greek state and even more so to the Greek society. It exclusively went to repay the debt, right? So if they say no, we reject your proposals, we have a weapon. And the weapon is that this will immediately lead to default, actually. And default will provoke a big mess and a big turmoil within the European Union, within the European Central Bank, because everyone knows that the Greek debt, as such, is a negligible part of the overall European debt.

Tariq Ali: Because were the European Union to play hardline and say, okay we can’t do this, not because the debt is that large in terms of what we have but in terms of the domino effect. If we allow the Syriza people to do it, the Spanish will ask for it next, the Irish and who knows even the Portuguese might begin to demand something different. So stop it. If they were stupid enough to do that, which they are capable of, then the openings in Europe could be huge. Because if a Syriza government then defaulted, that would create complete panic and it would bring people out onto the streets in my opinion. You see, one of the things you said which I think is extremely important to stress, and it’s linked to the South American experience. That in order to combat partially successfully the propaganda of the Western media networks who are saying, this is Chávez’s Venezuela, ‘it’s a dictatorship’, when they had more elections than virtually any other government in South and North America combined, the only way support could be seen since the West refuses to accept the election results, saying this was a fluke, this was a free, was to get people out onto the streets. I mean, I remember after they tried to topple Chávez being in Caracas and there were a million and a half people on the streets to mark the anniversary of the coup. And when you see the people on the streets, you realise the value and importance of mass mobilisations.  So I’ve been saying to Greek friends and comrades that a key aspect is going to be, whatever you do, even when the negotiations are taking place, that the level of mass mobilisation should be high. I think trade union, mass popular democratic mobilisations are critically important in at least the first six months to a year of a Syriza government.

Stathis Kouvelakis: The way Syriza strategically deals with this challenge is the following one. First of all we are absolutely aware of the fact that we owe our rise now to governmental power to the importance and strength of the mass movements Greek society experienced, especially the two first years of the crisis between 2010 and 2012. We had approximately 40 days of general strike huge mass demonstrations, the squares and places and streets of the country being occupied by hundreds of thousands of people for, for weeks, a bit like the Indignados movement in Spain. And it’s no coincidence if it is in Greece and Spain that we have these new political landscape with those forces of the radical left that, you know, have risen in a spectacular way these last years.

So popular mobilisation has already been the key that leads us to where we are now. On the issue of the break with austerity politics, we do not negotiate that. This is non-negotiable. So we have a core set of commitments, which start from extremely basic things, the satisfaction of the immediate vital needs of the population that has been completely marginalised, of all those lives that have been broken by the austerity politics. So we want, you know, electricity, health coverage for the entire population, we will give money for food stamps but we also want to bring back the minimum wage to the level it was before the crisis. We need a political success, we need concrete measures that will give confidence to the people, that will give a concrete possibility for them to mobilise again and actually to go even further that what appears as moderate but absolutely essential objectives.

Tariq Ali: This will of course necessitate, let’s put it like this, stinging the bourgeoisie, the Greek bourgeoisie, which has had it without any regulation or controls at all. They have made money like nobody else. The ship owners’ mafia pays no taxes at all and is very proud of the fact and boasts about it – ha! Greece, they are in our pockets. Well, the politicians and the media are in the pockets of the oligarchs as we know. So they will have to be taxed. And secondly and important question, is also for how long can you leave the church to be untaxed? I know this is a very sensitive question in Greece, but they own large tracts of property. You know, we don’t have the image of sort of peasant monks or workers monks, we have the church as an institution which something has to be done about in the sense that it should pay its share of the normal taxes, which helps ordinary people. They shouldn’t even be opposed to it. So that’s one big issue on which previous governments have refused to do anything, taxing the rich and the very rich. And linked to that of course is that question of stopping privatisations and making sure that the utilities which you were talking about – hospitals, schools – are in fact owned by the state. Because that you can’t depend on privatisation and privatised companies to deliver the goods, as we are finding out in Britain and other parts of Europe.

Stathis Kouvelakis: Actually they are selling the infrastructure, they are selling the airports, the ports of Greece, the electricity company, the water company. So I mean basic utilities. And this is completely scandalous, I mean completely scandalous. Everyone knows that there is a lot of corruption behind this. The Qataris and a Greek tycoon have recently bought what is considered probably the best operation of real estate in Europe. It is the old airport of Athens, nearby the sea. So a very large piece of land that was sold to these people for 70 euros per square metre. So it’s hardly to imagine, you know, the kind of corruption that was behind this kind of deal. It’s perfectly possible purely in legal terms to cancel most of the privatisation, not to say all that have been done recently and to actually to take back all these assets. Furthermore, the Greek bourgeoisie as you said is typical, is a mixture of Subaltern bourgeoisie that considered its own country as a colony in a way that never had a proper national project of developing which is typical of a peripheral country, and extreme neoliberalism. A fiscal reform is absolutely needed and environmental legislation is absolutely needed and is crucial to break with the previous model of development. Because you see the memoranda, we say neoliberalism, actually, there is a project behind this and the most visible part of the privatisation of the coast and the type of tourist industry they want to create.

Tariq Ali: The big difference between Spain and Greece on one level is that, unlike Greece, where there is a far right and an openly fascist far right – these are not post-fascists or neo-fascists or liberal – these are fascists who demonstrate on the streets with fascist banners, who observe Hitler’s birthday, who are embedded even in the special security organs of the state. That you don’t have in Spain because of the past and because a lot of the extreme right integrated itself in traditional right wing conservatism. So Podemos does not have to confront this threat, whereas a Syriza government, it could be confronted by right wing street mobilisations encouraged by the previous regime and how are they going to deal with that?

Stathis Kouvelakis: I mean, I think that the issue of the rise of, not just the far right but of a proper neo-Nazi organisation like Golden Dawn – which has entered parliament with seven percent of the vote in 2012 but nearly got nine percent of the vote in the recent European elections. The situation of Greece is in a way comparable to that of Germany after the Versailles treaty, because the people really have the feeling that they have been brutally pauperised, humiliated socially, but also nationally due to the Troika rule. And it is on that ground that this primitive and completely delirious form of nationalism developed by Golden Dawn became suddenly relevant for some people. And it is also the violence of the situation created by this whole disaster at the economic and social level that made violent solutions appear as legitimate for parts of the population. Because they have scapegoated immigrants, I mean, that’s the standard story of course. So what can we do? We have to find within the state apparatus, that’s quite clear, we have to dismantle those pockets of really fascist networks within the status apparatus and especially within the police.

The main problem is within the police, the judiciary, and there is the possibility of a strategy of increased tension, Italian-style, like the 1970s. But Golden Dawn, despite its appeal within Greek society, has not developed into a mass party, properly speaking. It’s a small organisation of thugs, which is funded by the kind of mafia type of operations and isolated fractions, but relatively marginal fractions, of the Greek bourgeoisie who just want to use these thugs in order to sort out issues at the level of their neighbourhood, of their company and so on and so forth. They want to control the Port of Piraeus for instance with the help of Golden Dawn, some ship owners’ etcetera. So we have this situation that is one of the problems that, indeed, a Syriza government will have to face but you have reminded us that Greek history is very tormented. We only had a few decades of, let’s say, standard Western-type elementary life and democracy.

Tariq Ali: But Stathis, now that we see in the rest of the West that democracy itself is on the decline, a number of books have come out, quite serious books, explaining how it is on the decline and that this model of an extreme centre with centre left and centre right basically doing the same things which has created the openings for the left and the far right, doesn’t give them all that much credibility today. Because they have tried with neoliberalism, with austerity, with backing all the wars, and failed. So that is what gives me some hope that a Syriza government and a Podemos government in Spain, which carry out even modest reforms initially but in effect reassert and establish Greek sovereignty and Spanish sovereignty. Both against the bankers’ elite that rules the European Union and more importantly against the United States. Against in the sense of saying, no, our interests clash with yours and we are not going to do what you want to do and what you’ve always expected us to do. Were they even to do that I think it could really change the political atmosphere on this continent.

Stathis Kouvelakis: I totally agree with you Tariq. I mean, the main issue is that social democracy and the parties coming from the tradition of the workers’ movement have been on the decline, they have been converted to neoliberalism, you know the Labour Party in Britain is a caricature actually of that situation of what, you know, used to be even a social democratic left. The main, the crucial challenge of Syriza and Podemos is that these parties have strong ties with the popular classes of their own societies. They are determined to fight for basic democratic and social reforms. That’s one dimension. But the second is, I think, the international dynamic of that. We shouldn’t underestimate the hope that is invested in Syriza and in Podemos more broadly in Europe now. I was in Paris just a few days ago and the big mass gathering, the big rally to support Syriza actually acted as a catalyst for discussions and debates within the French left. With the Greens for instance, who until recently were part of the government and have left government since the European elections, now they issued a statement to support Syriza and they came to the rally and they said, ‘for us, the reference now is Podemos and Syriza’.  That’s an indication, I mean we can have all kinds of reservations about what they want to do etcetera, but this is the capacity that Syriza can really trigger realignments within the broader progressive forces at the political but also at the social level. The rally in Paris was against, it was a point of convergence, of social movements, of campaigns, of trade unions. So I think that if the Syriza government starts a battle with the European institutions, if it makes a point at the European level, it can really provoke a dynamic and a recomposition of broader social and political forces at the European level and trigger what is absolutely essential, a new internationalism.

Tariq Ali: And, I mean, we have not had a poll of attraction for the left in Europe for a very long time, Stathis. As a Greek activist yourself, we are sitting here talking five days before the election, how do you feel?

Stathis Kouvelakis: Well, these are very strange moments, you know, Tariq. First of all, if one told me that, you are in a party that will be in a couple of years at the gate of power, I would say, ‘this is completely stupid, this will never happen in my lifetime’. I started become politically active at the very end of the 1970s, so it means that I have been through just a series of defeats, until recently. And now I feel that very strange combination of emotion, excitement and anxiety.

Tariq Ali: Stathis, thank you very much.

Stathis Kouvelakis: Thank you, Tariq

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