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| Alexis Tsipras, Greece's hope peddler |
Most reports put the resignation of Alexis Tsipras last week down to an act of desperation due to a loss of support in his own coalition in Syriza. 25 MPs have split off to form Popular Unity, basically composed of Syriza's old Left Platform. This party intends to stay true to the Syriza platform of an end to austerity, evidently adding in Grexit and a return to the drachma as planks.
How wonderfully conservative of the lefties. The Greek left has moved so far to the left it's become the bourgeois nationalist right.
True as all this is, Tsipras' resignation was actually an exertion of his power in the current circumstances and a demonstration of his political acumen.
By resigning now instead of sometime later, Tsipras is able to do two important things. One, he can select the candidates himself according to the rules who will replace the defectors, for whom he will use his popularity to smooth their way to election, presumably on 20 September. But he also catches the opposition flat-footed thereby, giving them no time to prepare to stop him. If Tsipras is successful in this gambit, he will be able to form a less leftist government committed to the Euro but also committed to breaking the privileges of the Greek oligarchy, approximating a key leftist political aim of more social equality.
Tsipras is proving himself to be quite adept at discerning politics as the art of the possible, for which he is already much hated by the overly principled figures populating his own and the other political parties, even as the Greek people keep supporting him.
For all the mistakes he has made this year, Alexis Tsipras has proven himself remarkably capable for such a young man.
Greece could do a lot worse, and it has.
