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Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg speaking in Glasgow, Scotland, November 10, 2021. (Ian Forsyth / Getty Images)
When I saw a WIRED piece on my Twitter feed this week emblazoned with the title “Pete Buttigieg Loves God, Beer, and His Electric Mustang,” I assumed that only one of two things could possibly be happening. Either this was a piece of vintage Butti-ganda from circa 2019 that was remaking the rounds, or I had inadvertently bitten into an accursed Proustian madeleine and been swept back in time. But the interview/adulatory write-up on America’s secretary of transportation is indeed, somehow, from the Year of Our Lord 2023.
To call it hagiographic would be something of an undersell. The piece — incidentally penned by someone who in 2016 described Hillary Clinton as “an idea, a world-historical heroine, light itself” — opens with two stanzas that similarly make the former mayor of Indiana’s fourth-largest city sound like a fusion of Jesus Christ and Aristotle:
The curious mind of Pete Buttigieg holds much of its functionality in reserve. Even as he discusses railroads and airlines, down to the pointillist data that is his current stock-in-trade, the US secretary of transportation comes off like a Mensa black card holder who might have a secret Go habit or a three-second Rubik’s Cube solution or a knack for supplying, off the top of his head, the day of the week for a random date in 1404, along with a non-condescending history of the Julian and Gregorian calendars.
As Secretary Buttigieg and I talked in his underfurnished corner office one afternoon in early spring, I slowly became aware that his cabinet job requires only a modest portion of his cognitive powers. Other mental facilities, no kidding, are apportioned to the Iliad, Puritan historiography, and Knausgaard’s Spring — though not in the original Norwegian (slacker). Fortunately, he was willing to devote yet another apse in his cathedral mind to making his ideas about three mighty themes — neoliberalism, masculinity, and Christianity — intelligible to me.
Following the absurd suggestion that the likes of Buttigieg and President Joe Biden may represent a nascent renaissance of “the religious left” (Buttigieg is an Episcopalian and Biden is a Catholic) we get to the interview itself. To give Buttigieg his due, he is better at sounding profound than your average liberal politician. Like Barack Obama, still the undisputed virtuoso of the shtick, he has a knack for communicating bland centrist orthodoxies with a superficial sheen of depth. He is capable of speaking about politics at some level of abstraction. He makes references to history. He refers to concepts like “modernity” and occasionally borrows words from other languages.
Throughout the conversation, most of what Buttigieg actually says is pretty conventional. He has the views and opinions on current events that one would reasonably expect an educated person of his background and class location to hold: liberal democratic capitalism is good; the utopian possibilities of 1990s globalization have failed to realize themselves; the invasion of Ukraine has been disruptive to the world order; traditional conceptions of masculinity are retrograde and conservative. The relevant issue here isn’t whether you agree or disagree, because the substance of the views themselves is almost beside the point. What matters is that Buttigieg exudes the right aura of sophistication and wonkish intelligence.
His act fares a bit less well in the second half of the interview, which is mostly taken up by a discussion of the role of faith in public policy. A few of the exchanges — like this one, in which Buttigieg swings dizzyingly from a reference to Paul the Apostle to a slogan you might associate with a sleazy evangelical salesman trying to hawk a used car — almost defy belief:
Q: Running [the Department of Transportation] seems to suit you. Are there more ways the challenges of transportation speak to your spiritual side?
A: There’s just a lot in the scriptural tradition around journeys, around roads, right? The conversion of Saint Paul happens on the road. I think we are all nearer to our spiritual potential when we’re on the move.
The closest we actually get to a description of how Christian faith informs Buttigieg’s political decision-making comes in the form of cookie-cutter compassion: “When you’re making public policy, you’re often asking yourself, ‘How does this choice help people who would have the least going for them?’ So that’s part of it.”
It’s unclear how the likes of stranded passengers forced to pay larcenous fares by under-regulated corporate airlines or underpaid railworkers being forced back to their jobs without sick pay fits into this pristine moral equation, but it ultimately doesn’t matter. When politics are reduced to pure fan culture, the affectations of intelligence or compassion take on a greater salience than their application in the real world. Politics become something you have rather than something you do. And over the past decade or so, Buttigieg has had as many different political identities as he has fawning profiles referencing his tastes in literature and his socks.
He’s been both a declared champion of quality public services and a corporate consultant pushing for their privatization. He’s unequivocally backed universal health care but also been its fierce opponent. He’s liberalism’s golden boy du jour but courted the Tea Party during his first run for elected office in 2010. A profile or interview that was even remotely interested in interrogating Buttigieg beyond the level of gesture and affect might have thought to probe these shifts at least a little bit.
But again, doing so would ultimately be beside the point. The political and media culture that produces and celebrates figures like Pete Buttigieg isn’t remotely concerned with ideological consistency. Its devotees are not looking for champions of a particular program, legislative agenda, or belief system, but rather mascots who bear the right credentials and cultural signifiers.
What really lies inside the “cathedral mind” of America’s Secretary of Transportation? As mere mortals, it’s not for us to know. He “comes off” like a Mensa black card holder who reads Knausgaard or might cite a random day of the week from 1404 and, evidently, that’s all that really matters.
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Police escort Pakistan’s former prime minister Imran Khan (C) as he arrives at the high court in Islamabad on May 12, 2023. (Aamir Qureshi / AFP via Getty Images)
On May 9, paramilitary forces arrested Pakistan’s former prime minister Imran Khan inside the Islamabad High Court (IHC). Khan was at the IHC for a legal hearing, but he was formally arrested over a different case related to kickbacks and money laundering.
More realistically, the forcible arrest was a response to Khan’s open accusation the previous day against a senior intelligence officer, Faisal Naseer. The former premier accused the officer of orchestrating attacks on Khan’s life. The leveling of this accusation against Naseer was in line with Khan’s dramatic falling out with the Pakistani military leadership over the last year and a half.
In response, for at least a few days in central Pakistan, the military faced a measure of comeuppance that was long overdue. Over the last seventy years, the Pakistani ruling bloc —especially its militarized core — has consistently instrumentalized forces and discourses of the conservative right to suppress every progressive stirring in Pakistani society in the name of national security.
Pakistan’s ruling bloc has crushed every popular movement for freedom and self-determination in the name of national security.
The bloc has choked every democratic impulse in the name of religion and crushed every popular movement for freedom and self-determination in the name of national security. It has invaded and destroyed the privacy of homes and violated the sanctity of life and body through forced disappearances.
Now, however, a popular force has emerged — to be sure, a popular force of the Right — that has invaded and looted the extraordinarily ornate homes of Pakistan’s generals. It violates their privacy and safety in the name of the same national security, religion, and patriotism that has previously been weaponized against every popular stirring among Pakistan’s oppressed classes and nations.
The Supreme Court gave Khan relief within two days of his forcible arrest. This was an index of both the spontaneous public outpouring of demands for his release and the support Khan enjoys in key parts of the Pakistani state (including the officer class and rank and file of its military).
The situation remains tense, with the ousted prime minister facing a slew of charges and popular sympathy for him at an all-time high, even while stop-start negotiations continue between Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party and the incumbent government for a consensus date on general elections.
To understand this perverse comeuppance of the Pakistani military establishment, it is useful for us to review the immediate context of Khan’s arrest, its relation to the ruling bloc’s general modus operandi, and the social bases of alienation and assertion in Pakistan today.
Let’s cast an eye over the Al Qadir Trust case that led to Khan’s arrest. Khan and his wife are accused of obtaining hundreds of acres of land and precious gifts from Pakistan’s biggest real estate tycoon, Malik Riaz, in return for facilitating the repatriation of an illegally accrued sum of £190 million from the UK. The extraordinary maneuvers behind the repatriation tell a tale of their own.
Of the total amount, £50 million derived from the Riaz family’s purchase of one of London’s prime properties, 1 Hyde Park Place, in 2016. They bought it from Hasan Nawaz, son of another former prime minister of Pakistan, Nawaz Sharif of the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) (PML-N) party. When Riaz came under investigation in 2019 by the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) for money laundering, the family agreed an out-of-court settlement whereby the sums in bank accounts and from the sale of the property would be transferred back to the Pakistani state.
Real estate chicanery and financial instruments have emerged as a major source of wealth for the Pakistani ruling classes.
In Pakistan, a parallel story was unfolding. The Supreme Court had fined Riaz’s company Bahria Town an extraordinary 460 billion rupees — the equivalent of $3 billion at the time — a few months earlier for illegally acquiring and profiting over twenty thousand acres of land in the peri-urban areas of Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city.
The development of Bahria Town Karachi itself, arguably the largest real estate project in South Asia, was achieved through violent displacement of the land’s historical residents. It contributed to ecological disaster and urban flooding caused by rapacious real estate expansion.
There were astronomical profits made from the project — over 2,500 percent in some cases. In the absence of any sustainable economic project, real estate chicanery and financial instruments have emerged as a major source of wealth for the Pakistani ruling classes.
In most cases, the displacement was carried out by local musclemen and “encounter-specialist” police officers linked to the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), which is now confined to Sindh province, and to the Pakistani security institutions. Indeed, the Bahria Town empire in Pakistan has achieved its present position of dominance on the back of support from the military establishment, with high-ranking officers pleading Riaz’s myriad cases in the courts, while also being offered lucrative jobs in the Bahria Town machine.
However, the Khan government (including its “accountability” tsar Shahzad Arshad) worked overtime to facilitate the repatriation of £190 million from the UK to the Supreme Court’s accounts in lieu of the 460 billion rupee fine. The money went directly to the court rather than the Pakistani state, to which it was owed. The relatively puny proceedings of one crime, foreign money laundering, were thus used to settle the much bigger penalty for another crime, illegal land-grabbing.
Every major faction, party, and institution of the Pakistani ruling bloc was thus involved in this brazen robbery of the public. From the PML-N and the PPP to Khan’s reigning PTI government and the military establishment, all have benefitted from their cozy relationship with the real estate monopolies. Hence the extraordinary nimbleness of state and polity in minimizing Riaz’s losses when the Supreme Court and UK NCA judgements appeared.
Political regimes in Pakistan have instrumentalized the themes of ‘corruption’ and ‘accountability’ to target their political opponents.
There are no innocent parties in this mélange of coercion and corruption. However, it is Khan and his wife who are currently being targeted by the government and military establishment, while the names of Riaz and his deep-state facilitators are barely mentioned.
Historically, political administrations in Pakistan (including that of Khan when he was in power) have instrumentalized the themes of “corruption” and “accountability” — and a selective fidelity to the truth — to target their political opponents. Partial accounting for the facts here lends itself to a patently ideological discourse on corruption that serves to hide the deep-rooted and interconnected coordinates of power and accumulation in Pakistan.
Khan’s arrest in the Al Qadir Trust case is another instance in this sordid history of tendentious targeting of out-of-favor politicians. Meanwhile, collective sharing of the spoils by Pakistan’s elites proceeds apace.
We can also help explain the latest round of Khan-centered insurgency by looking at the politico-economic modus operandi of the Pakistani ruling bloc. Corruption and fraud, as Antonio Gramsci reminded us, stand halfway between consent and coercion. They are an index of a ruling bloc’s weak hegemonic project that possesses limited ideological and material resources with which to incorporate the popular classes.
In Pakistan, networks of patronage and graft function to keep unreliable allies onside.
In Pakistan, networks of patronage and graft function to keep unreliable allies onside. They also help tie contractors, middlemen, and capitalists both large and small to the Pakistani state and its mainstream parties through highly personalized linkages.
The narrow social base and modus operandi of the ruling bloc also conditions the populist insurgency represented by Khan and his PTI movement. On the one hand, limited opportunities for the accumulation of wealth and the diminishing scale of imperial patronage available over the last decade, especially from the United States, has driven different fractions of the ruling elite to engage in fratricidal conflict over what’s left.
This tendency has expressed itself in different ways, from the intractable seesaw of civil-military political relations, to the military’s maneuvers to reverse devolution of fiscal and administrative powers to Pakistani provinces. It has couched this attempted move against federalism in the language of technocracy, seeking to short-circuit even the highly limited mechanisms of representation offered by Pakistan’s capitalist democracy.
A significant section of Pakistan’s upper and upper-middle classes — including those linked to the military and state bureaucracy, landed magnates, an emerging petty bourgeoisie, and white-collar professionals — have found in the PTI and Khan a vehicle for their elitist, centralizing aspirations. The same social layers dominated the PTI’s parliamentary echelons and shaped its policy measures while in power, forming the hegemonic core of the party.
On the other hand, Khan has also found vast reserves of popularity among Pakistan’s lower classes and young people under the age of thirty, who constitute over 60 percent of the country’s population. The venality and narrow bases of the incumbent parties are the central factors at work here. With no expansive socioeconomic project that could absorb a burgeoning, urbanized youth population, the ruling bloc resorts to militarized coercion, networks of patronage, and an unstable cocktail of praetorianism, patriotism, and religion as a substitute.
However, with the profound economic travails of the ruling bloc showing no sign of ending, even these limited capacities for absorption are now exhausted. Inflation is currently running at over 30 percent, the highest in half a century, and is expected to rise further. All this is unfolding while International Monetary Fund (IMF)–mandated structural adjustment is killing economic growth.
Pakistan is spending more than two-thirds of state revenue (obtained mostly through regressive, indirect taxation) on servicing the debt burden and military expenditures.
The Pakistani state owes more than $120 billion in foreign debt and even more in domestic debt. It is spending more than two-thirds of state revenue (obtained mostly through regressive, indirect taxation) on servicing the debt burden and military expenditures. Everything else, from government salaries to social expenditures, is financed through further borrowing.
The country has signed a dozen IMF programs over the last three decades, the latest by the Khan government in 2019, to help with recurrent balance-of-payments crises. It owes $25 billion each year in principal payments to international creditors.
There is a $10 billion annual shortfall in these payments due to the country’s narrow productive bases and its reliance on remittances and aid from export of labor and military services. Even if the latest stalled tranche of IMF funding arrives, in these twilight days of the Pakistani ruling bloc’s role as a regional gendarme for US imperialism, the IMF and the international financial interests behind it are demanding their full pound of flesh.
There has been a runaway increase in the price of basic commodities, energy, and medicine due to the slashing of subsidies at the behest of the IMF. Long lines of containers at the Karachi port, downsizing at industrial establishments up and down the country, and deadly stampedes at charity food distributions all testify to the ruling bloc’s infliction of horrific austerity upon the people of Pakistan.
Over the last year alone, the number of unemployed has increased by two million and as many as eighteen million have fallen below the poverty line. The number of “idle” male youths is estimated to be around eight million, while between 15 to 30 percent of adults suffer from mental health disorders. An extraordinary recent report by the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics put the unemployment rate among young graduates as high as 33 percent, with a full 23 percent taking on “unpaid jobs” — a perverse euphemism for super-exploitation.
It is this coming together of elite and middle-class fears with the alienation of youth and the popular classes that finds expression in a populist movement centered on Khan. Here the reaction of the entitled meets the alienation of the young and the marginalized.
Khan’s hyper-sexualized celebrity status and his deft invocation of themes of personal struggle and Islamic history have served to cement his status as a nucleus around which, in the words of Gramsci, “a multiplicity of dispersed wills, with heterogeneous aims, are welded together with a single aim.” This unstable combination of elements, welding together diverse social and ideological impulses, also lends the PTI’s populism an ambiguous character that often confuses commentators.
The ambiguity of Khan’s base, his popularity, and the polarization that has developed around his figure finds reflection in the positions that have been adopted by sections of the domestic and foreign commentariat. On the one hand, there is a section of the international left — often self-proclaimed “anti-imperialists” — who have taken at face value Khan’s claim to have been targeted by a US-orchestrated regime-change operation.
In power, Imran Khan did not possess even the semblance of a genuine anti-imperialist and pro-people program.
The claim is based in particular on reports of an unpleasant meeting between an official of the State Department and the Pakistani ambassador in Washington. Khan himself has disowned the theory and now squarely blames the former army chief Qamar Bajwa for his ouster. In fact, the nature of Khan’s social coalition and the policies he pursued while in power show that he did not possess even the semblance of a genuine anti-imperialist and pro-people program.
For example, the PTI government completely capitulated to the IMF soon after coming to power. It accelerated economic deregulation and privatization while stalling the Pakistan leg of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative, and greatly facilitated the established military and real estate monopolies. Anti-Western rhetoric and claims to leadership of the Islamic world merely served to obfuscate the inadequacy of Khan’s approach to social and material issues.
The militarist, patriarchal, and ultimately elite-centered politics of the PTI takes refuge behind a claim to represent “the nation” and its interests (against foreign powers). We should not substitute geopolitics for class politics and denude anti-imperialism of its social content. This leads only to a dead end where rhetoric takes the place of politics as such.
On the other hand, Pakistan’s liberal intelligentsia has either supported or adopted a strategic silence in face of the state crackdown against the PTI. They characterize Khan and his supporters as a “fascist” or “quasi-fascist” force and implicitly advocate an alliance with the state and the incumbent parties against this supposed “extraordinary threat.” Once again, there is a failure to account for the actual coordinates of class power and social programs (or the lack thereof).
This approach ignores the continuities of class power between Khan and his opponents, whose historical and structural failings fuel the PTI insurgency. Those who extol the “norms” of liberal democracy in Pakistan dismiss the regular resort to militarized coercion as stemming from the subjective failings of politicians such as Nawaz, Khan, and others. They turn a blind eye to the social and historical limitations that constantly produce reservoirs of discontent and condition the resort to authoritarian solutions.
The conditions of economic crisis and political paralysis in Pakistan certainly contain a fascist potential. Khan has mobilized the militarist and Islamist rhetoric of mainstream Pakistani nationalism, fusing these ideas in a personalized narrative of struggle against elite oppression.
Overblown rhetoric and ideological hyperbole is not enough to qualify a movement as fascist.
However, overblown rhetoric and ideological hyperbole is not enough to qualify a movement as fascist. The PTI has no systematic program or vehicle of terror on the model of the Nazi Brownshirts or the Hindutva right’s Bajrang Dal in India. Nor do Khan and the PTI possess the organized social base, especially among the popular classes, that has characterized fascisms, both historical and contemporary.
“Hatred alone,” as Frantz Fanon once reminded us, “cannot draw up a program.” The PTI’s recently unveiled “new economic plan” is the usual mélange of frequently advocated measures that have already proved unsuccessful: export-oriented growth, promotion of foreign investment, and privatization. There is no indication that Khan’s party is willing to attack the entrenched monopolies and landed magnates that receive up to $17 billion in subsidies each year.
Khan and his base thus have neither the social capacity nor the program for a wide-ranging remaking of state, society, and economy — let alone a revolutionary program from the Right of the kind that fascism has historically entailed.
What Khan and his unstable social coalition do have is a resort to personalized charisma and a form of hysterical nationalism. This does not challenge the power and wealth of the Pakistani military so much as it seeks an equal partnership with the bloc. Khan has selectively targeted the former army chief rather than the military establishment as a whole. His silence about its economic empire and its oppression of Pakistan’s marginalized classes and nationalities indicates his desire to seek accommodation rather than revolution.
Two tendencies condition the macho posturing and hysterical nationalism of Khan’s populism. On the one hand, sections of the Pakistani elite and its middle classes harbor reactionary inclinations; on the other, there is vast and growing alienation among the masses. It is worth remembering that in its original Greek and then Freudian meaning, hysteria is a psychological condition born out of trauma. The depravities of Pakistan’s historically privileged groups and the deprivations of its oppressed classes thus find a messianic outlet in the personality of Khan. Instead of a revolution of the oppressed, we have revenge of the repressed.
Khan’s right-wing populism represents neither anti-imperialism nor fascism. It derives from the historical failings of Pakistan’s ruling bloc and its reliance on theological and patriotic obfuscations to legitimize itself. Khan himself has emerged as an alternative focus of attraction and devotion to the military in central Pakistan.
Another round of turbocharged austerity and monetary tightening will generate fresh reserves of popular discontent.
The current government suffers from a paralysis of social capacity and imagination. It has no program for progressive economic restructuring. With little prospect of fortuitous geopolitical events that might result in aid from outside, Pakistani elites will have to go back to the IMF soon after completing the current program.
Another round of turbocharged austerity and monetary tightening will generate fresh reserves of popular discontent, no matter what Khan or the other political actors do. This long-term structural crisis, combined with the generational shifts in Pakistan’s society and polity, gives the present moment the feel of a new conjuncture.
A new sociopolitical terrain is emerging, organized around Khan, the military, and fractions cutting within and across them. The established elites are faltering and now find themselves aligned in varying combinations along these nodes. The long-term resources of economic power and imperial patronage are now exhausted, and a radicalized Pakistani nationalism has crystalized around Khan’s personality cult.
Khan’s right-wing populism will disappoint many of his supporters and dissipate their energies by seeking accommodation with the power bloc, as was already the case during its previous stint in government. But there is a dangerous contradiction at work in this moment too, as well as a weaker potential for a better outcome.
Large sections of the young and the alienated in both central Pakistan and its peripheralized areas have been exposed to the oppression of the militarized ruling bloc. They are forging a critique of that bloc in the crucible of practical experience. Yet Pakistan’s decadent guardians of order will not vacate their perch easily.
The intractability of Pakistan’s multifaceted crisis means that any miscalculation, any minor oversteps from one side or another, could trigger a chain reaction that leads to what Karl Marx once called “the common ruin of all contending classes.” While socialism is not on the cards for us, barbarism definitely is.
Jerome Ellis, a 49-year-old former store worker for Dollar General in DeLand, Florida, learned the consequences of food and water poisoning on Thursday when he was sentenced to four years in state prison. The cause? Spiking his colleague’s Pepsi with bleach.
The incident occurred on October 24, 2022, when, according to the Volusia County sheriff’s report, a worker at the store left an open Pepsi can on a counter during a bathroom break and noticed that it smelled and tasted of bleach upon his return. The worker panicked and called 911, then told the manager about what had happened and secured the can in a safe place.
After reviewing the store’s surveillance video, the victim blamed Ellis for pouring bleach into the Pepsi can. A deputy questioned Ellis about the situation, during which Ellis claimed that everything had resulted from spilled cleaning solution – which the video proved to be false. After being given the opportunity, Ellis admitted to intentionally spiking the Pepsi “as payback for [the co-worker] being difficult to work with” and brushing up against him.
Fortunately, the victim had only come into contact with the tainted soda and did not require medical attention. On Thursday, Ellis was convicted of the felony charge of poisoning food or water and received the maximum state prison sentence of four years.
Posters featuring images of Aléxis Tsípras, head of Syriza party, ahead of the general election in Thessaloniki, Greece, on May 16, 2023. (Konstantinos Tsakalidis / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
As Greece heads for a general election on Sunday, its citizens surely have plenty of reason for discontent. The country is, after all, still reeling from years of neoliberal policies, whose sheer savagery is without comparison in Western Europe. The effects of austerity were dramatically illustrated at the end of February, when fifty-seven people died in the Tempi train disaster, prompting angry protests. Yet ahead of the election, the political situation seems rather stagnant.
The incumbent ruling party is Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s right-wing New Democracy, which has held power since 2019. While a change in the electoral system leaves it unlikely to achieve an outright majority — with a high possibility of a second election to follow — it has maintained its lead in national polls. The main opposition party, Syriza, seems unable to capitalize on popular discontent, amidst the enduring trauma of its capitulation to austerity in July 2015.
To its left, a new coalition called MeRA25-Alliance for Rupture has formed for this election, seeking to overcome this baleful legacy. It brings together MeRA25, the movement created by former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, which entered parliament in the 2019 elections (on 3.4 percent support), and Popular Unity, formed in 2015 by the currents emerging from the left wing of Syriza and certain sectors of the far left, with the support of social-movement activists and intellectual figures. This coalition aims at rebuilding a united radical-left space, able to learn from past failures and respond to the challenges of the present.
Mariana Tsichli is co-secretary of Popular Unity and a candidate for the coalition in the Athens-Center constituency. She spoke to Stathis Kouvelakis about its prospects.
Stathis Kouvelakis
Everyone seems to agree that this election campaign is particularly sluggish and lacking in substance. There is widespread distrust toward political parties and expectations seem particularly low. Such a situation is unprecedented in Greece. How do you explain this?
Mariana Tsichli
Yes, this is probably the most opaque and unpredictable election I can remember. There is no debate and little, if any, involvement of the wider public in the campaign. At the moment, there doesn’t seem to be a strong polarization between Syriza and New Democracy.
The main explanation is the popular disillusionment with the main forces of the political system. This includes the Left, which is paying the price for Syriza’s capitulation in 2015 and its subsequent four-year term in government. A large part of society now believes that “all politicians are the same” and that there is no alternative.
A large part of society now believes that ‘all politicians are the same’ and that there is no alternative.
A second factor lies in the programs and the kind of policies offered by the mainstream parties. They are not absolutely identical, but on fundamental issues the positions of New Democracy, Syriza, and Pasok are very similar. These parties agree that the neoliberal framework imposed by the three memoranda signed between the previous Greek governments and the EU cannot be challenged. So, whoever wins the elections, it will make little difference to the policies that follow.
There is also a problem with the quality of public debate. The kind of issues promoted by the media have nothing to do with people’s real concerns. The press only talk about small nuances within this basic common ground. As polls do not predict any clear majority, the discussion centers on punditry about seat numbers and possible coalitions rather than the programmatic substance.
Stathis Kouvelakis
In the days following the Tempi railway disaster, we saw an upsurge in popular mobilization. People took to the streets by hundreds of thousands, with the youth in the front line. In recent years, we have also seen some remarkable social struggles and mobilizations. Today, however, these events do not seem to have left any imprint.
Mariana Tsichli
The Tempi train collision cannot be considered as an accident. It was the predictable result of austerity and privatizations, and there are criminal responsibilities for what happened. Last March, we saw the largest demonstrations since Syriza had first come to power, comparable only to the rallies before the July 2015 referendum. People, and particularly the young, took to the streets en masse — even in small villages. This was a real breakthrough.
Perhaps less well known is that there were mobilizations throughout Mitsotakis’s government. We could mention some major strikes against the anti-labor laws voted in parliament and the struggles against the university police and mounting state authoritarianism, culminating in the government’s attempt to severely restrict street demonstrations. Last winter, there were also protracted mobilizations by artists who saw their degrees downgraded following a government decision.
The weakness of opposition is an effect of the demoralization that followed the defeat in 2015. But it also owes to the fact that since then the radical left hasn’t been able to offer a political perspective credible enough to overturn this situation.
However, this vibrant social movements activity doesn’t enter mainstream debate, nor is it reflected in the political field. One reason is that media is dominated by the same oligarchs who support the Mitsotakis government. Their goal is to ensure a second term for New Democracy, if possible with a clear parliamentary majority.
The attitude of large sectors of the Left wasn’t particularly helpful either. These forces have not stood united in these struggles and therefore have undermined their ability to become cohesive and durable.
These mobilizations ended quickly and something similar has happened many times over the last four years. Surely this is an effect of the demoralization that followed the defeat in 2015. But it also owes to the fact that since then the radical left hasn’t been able to offer a political perspective credible enough to overturn this situation.
Stathis Kouvelakis
The dominant narrative both in Greece and abroad is that it successfully exited the bailout programs and has returned to normality. All three parties that managed the memoranda — New Democracy, Syriza, and Pasok — have the same version of this story. Does it hold water?
Mariana Tsichli
This narrative is a deliberate lie. The mainstream parties and the business interests they represent know very well that to formally exit these programs, Greece has made a series of commitments to its creditors. These commitments run until 2060, when a large proportion of the loans under the memoranda will theoretically have been repaid. Until then, Greece is under “post-program surveillance” by the EU, like all countries who haven’t repaid at least 75 percent of their loans, for instance Portugal and Spain.
The goal is for Greece to maintain primary surpluses [meaning that state revenue is higher than state spending, excluding interest payments on consolidated government liabilities] of at least 2.2 percent for the next decades while expected growth rates are very low, even according to official forecasts. Whoever is in power, this means endless harsh austerity, unless this framework is canceled.
All this is being done in the name of paying off an unsustainable public debt. It currently stands at €400 billion, to which we must add €300 billion in private debt, while Greece’s annual GDP is only €178 billion. These indicators are worse than those with which we entered the first memorandum in 2010 [€300 billion and a 130 percent debt ratio in late 2009].
A huge social disaster has taken place in Greece, and it has not been repaired, nor is it likely to be with the kind of policy shared by the main parties. The magnitude of the catastrophe is unprecedented in peacetime. Greek GDP is now 25 percent lower than in 2010, when the first memorandum was passed. Before the memoranda, GDP per capita was about 75 percent of Germany’s, now it’s 42 percent. Wages have fallen by 30 percent cumulatively. The process of deindustrialization and the dismantling of whatever productive base was left is intensifying. How far this remains manageable depends on the imposition of further harsh neoliberal policies.
Stathis Kouvelakis
The memoranda do not only mean endless austerity and the crushing of labor rights. They have established something even deeper, namely a series of structural regulations that mean a loss of national sovereignty and of the Greek state’s ability to follow a policy of its own.
Mariana Tsichli
Much of what is happening in Greece today is unprecedented. We no longer have our own tax authority because the supposedly “independent” AADE [Independent Authority for Public Revenue] is in fact controlled by the creditors. In essence, Greece doesn’t have the means to control and enact policy as a sovereign state.
All public property has been ceded for ninety-nine years to the so-called “Growthfund,” an institution also controlled by the creditors, and serves as a guarantee for servicing the Greek debt. This fund can decide the sale of any public asset without asking anyone in this country, to assure the payment on time of the tranches of the loans.
A huge social disaster has taken place in Greece, and it has not been repaired, nor is it likely to be with the kind of policy shared by the main parties.
To this we must add what is valid for the entire European Union. By definition, the framework of the Eurozone forbids any notion of an independent monetary policy and the EU rules put the budgetary policy of all member-states under heavy constraint.
The Greek Parliament has also voted that the next parliaments will not have the right to repeal or amend any measure or law prescribed by the memoranda unless they have the creditors’ permission. Clearly, there is no possibility of implementing any kind of alternative economic and social policy without challenging this loss of state sovereignty.
Stathis Kouvelakis
On issues of national sovereignty, we need to touch on Greece’s foreign policy. One of the saddest aspects of Syriza’s legacy in government is that it deepened the country’s integration to NATO and the US-led “Western camp.” This is unprecedented for a party that still nominally refers to the “radical left.” Of course, such a policy was already in place for decades, but Syriza has continued and intensified it. What are the consequences for Greece and the wider region?
Mariana Tsichli
Immediately after the 2015 capitulation, Syriza made it clear that it would align itself with its predecessors on that terrain as well. At a symbolic level, it even dared to invite a US president — [Barack] Obama — to Greece on the anniversary of the 1973 Athens Polytechnic uprising, which carries a very heavy meaning in Greek history. It is a moment that preserves the memory the anti-imperialist and anti-US sentiment of a people who suffered under a Washington-backed military dictatorship.
But beyond the symbols, there are also concrete moves. Syriza, among other similar initiatives, allowed the expansion of the US military installations in the strategic port of Alexandroupolis in the North and in Stefanovikio in central Greece, near the city of Volos. Now we see that Alexandroupolis serves as a NATO hub that will possibly be used in conflicts in the wider area, especially in the war now raging in Ukraine.
What is perhaps the most shocking is that after four years of New Democracy in government, [Syriza’s Aléxis] Tsípras and Mitsotakis now compete with each other to appear as the most ardent supporters of commissioning Rafale and F16 planes and increasing military spending in order to be recognized as the most obedient member of NATO. Greece already spends more on its military, as a share of its GDP, than the US does (3.9 versus 3.5 percent)!
As far as the war in Ukraine is concerned, the Mitsotakis government has shown particular zeal in implementing NATO decisions. It was one of the first to send weapons to Ukraine and willingly included the country in the network of sanctions imposed on Russia, which primarily affect our own people as well as the peoples of other countries that imposed them.
The only criticism Syriza made of all this was procedural. The essence of its political attitude was to give full support for NATO’s strategy for the wider region, as exemplified with the case of Ukraine. These paths are very dangerous and expose the country to disastrous adventures. Fortunately, large sectors of Greek public opinion still oppose a level of ideological and political resistance to this type of narrative.
Stathis Kouvelakis
Let’s turn to the process that led to the formation of MeRA25-Alliance for Rupture. You come from the extraparliamentary left, but you have been part of Popular Unity from the beginning. This front was created after Tsípras’s capitulation in the summer of 2015 by currents splitting from Syriza, joined by other organizations of the radical left.
These forces were then in strong disagreement with Yanis Varoufakis, who, as a minister in the Syriza government, opposed leaving the euro and breaking with the European Union. Varoufakis voted against the memoranda and opposed Syriza’s surrender, but in the previous general elections, in 2019, his movement, MeRA25, and Popular Unity ran separately. How did this coalition come about in these elections?
Mariana Tsichli
As Popular Unity, we always thought it necessary to build broader convergences between forces of the radical left. The current state of fragmentation doesn’t help anyone and, above all, it does not help the workers’ movement, the youth, and the popular classes in Greece. Such a convergence needs to have a clear content, which presupposes an agreement on basic points, even though compromises are unavoidable. In social movements, in mobilizations, there is much more scope for unity between a wide range of forces. But alliances at the political level depend on specific programmatic conditions.
We have to recognize the context, after four years of an authoritarian government combining the extreme neoliberal center with the far right. It is vital to avoid another term for such a government.
A key point for us has been the shift of Varoufakis and MeRA25 to the Left in some of their basic positions. At its last congress, MeRA25 concluded that there can be no left alternative within the framework of the Eurozone and that a break is necessary. This represents a significant change from its previous position, which supported negotiations within the Eurozone to reorient it in a different direction.
The same applies to Greece’s relations with NATO, where there is also a clear shift toward disengagement and in favor of a multidimensional and nonaligned foreign policy. This process has made it possible for us to have a programmatic discussion with MeRA25. Its efforts to intervene in social movements also had a positive effect, as well as its consistent oppositional stance in parliament, where its MPs gave voice to important demands of the movements.
We have to recognize the context after four years of an authoritarian government combining the extreme neoliberal center with the far right. We cannot be indifferent to the outcome of the elections: it is vital to avoid another term for such a government.
But it is equally important to have an alternative to the logic of “lesser-evilism” that leads to voting for Syriza. That is why a level of programmatic convergence within the radical left is crucial. This also applies to the debate currently taking place about a possible “progressive government” as proposed by Tsípras’s party, in substance a coalition between Syriza and Pasok. But Syriza is also asking the other left-wing forces to support — or at least not oppose in parliament — the implementation of neoliberal policies under a “progressive” disguise.
Such a move would be disastrous for the whole left. A Syriza-led government cannot even be seen as a “lesser evil,” because its policies on key issues would be similar to the current ones. We have no reason to tarnish once again the credibility of the Left, which we have been struggling for eight years to reconstruct. It would be foolish to accept a proposal that leads the political scene in a conservative direction and alienates people from participating in politics.
Syriza is also asking the other left-wing forces to support — or at least not oppose in parliament — the implementation of neoliberal policies under a ‘progressive’ disguise.
This doesn’t mean that Syriza and Mitsotakis are identical or that we shouldn’t fight to prevent New Democracy getting a majority. That is why we believe that radical-left forces such as MeRA25-Alliance for Rupture should have the strongest possible representation in parliament. Under the new electoral system, achieving a parliamentary majority does not depend on the difference between the first- and second-placed parties in the popular vote, but on how many parties cross the 3 percent threshold to enter parliament. So, the success of our coalition has a broader significance for the overall balance of forces. It is also crucial for the strengthening of a combative and nonsectarian pole on the Left, the most important thing in the long run.
Stathis Kouvelakis
The main slogan of the MeRA25-Alliance for Rupture is “For the first time, rupture.” It inevitably reminds us of Syriza’s slogan in the January 2015 elections: “For the first time the Left,” meaning the possibility of a government to the left of social democracy. Beyond this allusion, what is the content of this proposed rupture?
Mariana Tsichli
The main lines of our program challenge the core of capital’s strategy in Greece. Even the points that respond to immediate social demands require ruptures in order to be implemented. For example, we have the most expensive electricity in Europe. To stop this scandal, we must abolish the so-called “energy exchange group” implemented by Syriza, which is simply an oligarchic cartel. But this is contrary to the “European energy market” set by the EU. We must also fight for the nationalization of the energy sector and the reconstitution of the former unified public company, which is also contrary to EU guidelines.
We will have to offer clear solutions for the nonperforming household loans, which is a huge problem for hundreds of thousands of households. During the period of the memoranda, the share of these loans has jumped from 3 to 50 percent. Now, following recommendations coming from Brussels, the “Hercules” plan allows funds to buy these loans at ridiculous prices and speculate on people’s homes under the shadow of foreclosures at a mass scale.
Our program also touches on crucial issues that may not currently be at the forefront of popular concerns. Indeed, it has to, given that the level of political debate has declined considerably since 2015. First comes the question of public debt. There cannot be a sustainable path for Greece without canceling most of its public debt, which is unsustainable in the long run. Key programmatic points also include a public banking system and public ownership of strategic enterprises and infrastructure, privatized over the last twelve years.
In our view, there can be no such change without a break with the Eurozone. It is a tough challenge, for which we have to prepare ourselves and the people; all these years there has been a relentless campaign spreading fear around this question. However, leaving the Eurozone is key. If you want to implement a program in favor of the people’s interests, it cannot be done any other way.
More generally, for us, there can be no “economy for the many” if we continue to rely on a model based exclusively on low value-adding services and tourism. This is capital’s plan for Greece. We, conversely, have a project for productive reconstruction based on ecological and democratic planning, with an emphasis on the primary sector, on specific sectors of manufacturing, and on high value-adding services. Otherwise, the course of desertification and plundering of the country will continue.
Stathis Kouvelakis
My last question is about the future prospects of the MeRA25-Alliance for Rupture. Some critical parts of the radical left say it is a purely electoral partnership between two contrasting bodies. Popular Unity is an organization with deep roots in the history of the radical left, while MeRA25 is a strongly leader-centered party, with a weak organizational base and a low presence in social movements. How would you respond to these criticisms?
Mariana Tsichli
I believe that the coalition between MeRA25 and Popular Unity and other forces and comrades that make up the Alliance for Rupture is a clear and sincere agreement respectful of the autonomy of each component. Its relations are based on equity, which lets each put forward its own programmatic orientations. This is also reflected in the composite name of the slate.
In essence, Greece doesn’t have the means to control and enact policy as a sovereign state.
The common program corresponds, in our opinion, to the needs of this period. All the points we discussed earlier point to the direction of breaking with capitalist and imperialist integration. The current conjuncture in Greece isn’t one of impending revolution, not even a fluid situation of mass contestation comparable to 2010–15. In such a context, the success of this coalition can reopen the possibility of a mass political intervention for the radical left.
However, this convergence needs to acquire greater depth to be able to thrive. Within the framework of the Alliance for Rupture, we are constantly calling the other forces of the radical and extraparliamentary left to build a broader convergence. These forces are significant in Greece and they have deep roots in social movements, in local councils, in workplaces, and in the student youth.
Stathis Kouvelakis
Are you planning to take initiatives in that direction after the elections?
Mariana Tsichli
I believe that if this electoral slate goes well in the polls and keeps on working together, it will offer a great opportunity for reconstructing the radical left, including forces that are not currently part of it. It can offer political visibility to a sociopolitical current that has not yet found a proper parliamentary representation.
To achieve this, we have a job to do that is more difficult than the one we did during the electoral campaign. We have to build counter-hegemonic practices at a grassroots level, strengthen our intervention in the youth, and build spaces of intervention in the labor movement and in local government. The latter is a serious issue: the recently changed legal framework further hampers the radical left’s presence in these institutions, by raising the threshold for representation.
In any case, the greatest possible unity is indispensable to change the balance of forces. National politics are obviously of great importance, but the spaces where struggles and movements are built from below are at least equally important.