With 99% of the vote counted in Greece, Syriza retakes power as before while Popular Unity at 2.86% of the vote gets NOTHING

Alexis Tsipras and Syriza consolidate power in Greece without the anti-austerity rebels

At this hour with 75% of the vote counted, Alexis Tsipras and Syriza are set to return to power and head the Greek government for the next four years with 145 seats and a coalition with the Independent Greeks as before, but without the Syriza rebels who left to form Popular Unity. The latter isn't polling even 3% and will not win one seat, meaning there is no viable party representing anti-austerity or a return to the drachma. Turn out at 56% hasn't been this low since 1946 when only 53% turned out when leftists boycotted the election.

With nine days to go before Greek elections, Syriza recaptures the lead in the latest ProRata poll

The latest Greek election poll result appears here today, showing left wing Syriza back on top with 28.5% of the vote and center right New Democracy roaring back strongly in second with 23.5% as more undecided voters in the last two weeks have made up their minds. Syriza had been taking a beating in various polls over the fortnight.

Nationalist Golden Dawn remains in third with 6.5%, unchanged from the end of August. The communist KKE and socialist PASOK are duking it out for fourth place with 4.5% of the vote each, while the Syriza rebels who formed Popular Unity have lost support and fallen below the 3% threshold necessary to get representation in the parliament. Two weeks ago Popular Unity had been polling at 3.5% but evidently as time has passed voters have realized these former compatriots of Alexis Tsipras really do mean to dump the Euro and go back to the Drachma, and want none of it. 

Greeks overwhelmingly continue to favor remaining in the Euro, but really like Tsipras over Meimarakis of New Democracy 37% to 25%.

The election is a week from Sunday.

Syriza youth wing declines to support Alexis Tsipras and Syriza in upcoming election

That could well signal it's already curtains for Syriza with less than three weeks to go to new elections.

From the story here at the Greek Reporter:

"On Monday, his speech writer Theodoros Kollias resigned stating that SYRIZA has lost its founding ideals. On Tuesday, the SYRIZA Youth issued a statement saying they withdraw their support to the party in the upcoming elections. Also, the same day, another part of the SYRIZA coalition, the Communist Drift, left the party and will join new SYRIZA offshoot Popular Unity. ...

"In social networks the party and its leader are ridiculed for the 180-degree turn from militant leftists to a more conservative, pro-euro political entity. The 20-24 percent the party gets in opinion polls is nothing compared to the 45-plus percentages they were getting just three months ago."

Syriza goes from "hope is coming" to "only ahead" just as Obama went from "hope" to "forward"

Is this a shameless rip-off of a 2011 hit by Greek pop star Demy or what?

The vote of the young and the dumb, as always, is key to the advance of socialism.

The biggest bloc of voters is undecided in the upcoming September Greek election according to a new poll

Reuters reports here:

Syriza was supported by 23 percent of those polled, with the conservative New Democracy party second on 19.5 percent, according to the survey, carried out by pollsters ProRata and published in Friday's Efimerida Ton Syntakton newspaper. ... Popular Unity, the party formed last week by Syriza rebels who oppose the bailout, was backed by 3.5 percent in Friday's poll - just above the 3 percent threshold needed to enter parliament. But the Independent Greeks, the ally in Tsipras' former coalition government, scored just 2 percent, meaning Syriza would be forced to seek another coalition partner. ... It also showed 25.5 percent of voters were still undecided, making them the biggest bloc.

What nobody talks about in these reports, of course, is that the party polling third is Golden Dawn, well ahead of Syriza breakaway party Popular Unity as well as the communist KKE. Golden Dawn has increased its support from earlier in the year no doubt because Greece is being overrun by refugees from around the Mediterranean and the incompetent left running the show is failing to solve the problem. Golden Dawn is said to draw its support at elections from members of the police and the military.

Yanis Varoufakis calls far left party Popular Unity's plan for Grexit and a return to the drachma "isolationist"

In Greece the left calls the left isolationist.

In America the right calls the right isolationist.

Maybe the isolationism is where the real meaning is, the other monikers "left" and "right" being obfuscatory and Orwellian, and useless.

The two candidates for president in America with any energy in their campaigns are against free-trade because it is one-sided trade which slowly impoverishes the American middle class. A more insidious form of Fabianism is hard to imagine. One of the candidates is a patriotic socialist throwback to the FDR 1930s, the other a businessman whose hero was another Democrat in recovery, Ronald Reagan.

In our time it has been only some people from the left who have seemed capable of understanding that our capitalism-in-name-only actually requires the destruction of the economic ladder along which historically Americans have more or less freely traveled both up and down. This is because only people of the left are acquainted with the truth of the observation by Marx how free-trade was to be welcomed because it hastened the revolution. We get absolutely no insight from the American right about this and they run headlong unaware toward their fate. Accordingly we get no sympathy from them either for the plight of formerly prosperous millions of Americans who have crashed onto the rocks of the libertarian free for all. Their few children will become the next proletariat, the wealth of their parents and grandparents only a faint memory. 

The irony of the world situation is that it is creatures of the left who want to stop this, both here in America and in Greece. 

Yanis Varoufakis on the other hand is not one of them. Chalk it up to being an "erratic" Marxist, as he likes to say. What he is is a pan-Europeanist, a world citizen and globalist who is more at home in European capitals than he is on Aegina. He is not for what Greeks need most, which is the ability to feed themselves and export at a profit, for which they must have control over, and responsibility for, their own affairs. 

Seen here:

'The 54-year-old Varoufakis has already dismissed speculation that he would join the far-left Popular Unity party that broke away from Syriza last week, telling ABC that he had "great sympathy" but fundamental differences with them and considered their stance "isolationist".'

In Greece the popular PM Alexis Tsipras resigned last week in order to consolidate his power

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.

Greek PM Alexis Tsipras has resigned today

Blow by blow coverage is provided in the UK by the Telegraph here and the Guardian here.

The next two largest political parties have a chance to try to form a government, but it is thought likely that they'll be unsuccessful and that snap elections will occur in a month.

Tsipras remains very popular, but will have to shed Syriza's Left Platform rebels to consolidate power in the new election with new blood, if he can get that far.

Greeks pass third draconian austerity/bailout package 222 to 64 with 11 abstentions

Looks like Alexis Tsipras' Syriza MPs defected in a big way: 32 No votes this time with 11 abstentions and 1 absent. This could prove fatal to Tsipras' continuance as Prime Minister. The Syriza coalition of the Left with 149 members partners with Independents with 12 in the 300 seat parliament. Tsipras' core support in parliament appears to have fallen to 39%.

The "erratic Marxist" Yanis Varoufakis voted No, after voting Yes and No previously, and reportedly offered to resign his seat so that Tsipras may appoint a reliable vote to replace him. 

The Guardian has full coverage here.

Leonid Bershidsky has it exactly backwards: Syriza's Left Platform turns out to be Greece's true conservative party, they just don't realize it

Here right out of the gate, and the rest of it is also quite as silly, not in the least because it asks the EuroGroup to devise the mechanism by which those already in the Euro will be shown the exit:

'Elect far-left politicians to run a country and they will still plot a revolution. That, apparently, is what ministers from the Syriza bloc were doing while negotiations with creditors were taking place. Though none of the crazy things they planned came to pass, Greece's radicals may someday be tempted to carry out a Syriza-style "Plan B." Euro-zone officials need to prepare for this eventuality and work out an exit procedure -- one that might still be needed.'

Yes, Greece's radicals. They went for the root alright, back to the drachma.

No, the real revolution was enticing Greece with the Euro because the Euro took the decision making about money out of the Greek people's hands. Revolting against that now is technically reactionary, but only in chronology, the new hobgoblin of little Hegelian minds. In reality preparing to go back to the drachma is an attempt to undo the revolution which the Euro wrought in Greece in the first place.

Greek dignity means having its own currency, just as it has its own glorious history, its own cooking, its own weather, language, culture, borders and so on. The drachma they can value and devalue on their terms, not someone else's. When the left in Greece and the rest of Europe wake up to the central importance of this fact, maybe the nightmare of this Euro farce will finally come to an end.

Euro Group creditors made a bundle off Greece's problems in 2014: 13 billion EUR

Moody's on Greece indicated today that the debt/GDP burden was already 177% before Syriza was even elected in 2015, but one man's debt burden is another man's opportunity.

Seen here:

'We assess Greece’s Fiscal Strength as `low’, because of the country’s high debt burden, which stood at around 177% of GDP at the end of 2014, one of the highest debt burdens in the universe of Moody’s-rated countries. Moreover, the potential to meaningfully improve the debt trend over the next 3-5 years is highly uncertain given that the large-scale reforms that could spur growth are currently hampered by ongoing political uncertainty.'

-------------------------------------------

Eurostat shows Greek GDP in current euros was just shy of 179.1 billion in 2014, down 26% from the 2008 peak. Greece is in a long, severe depression. Central government debt rose to 324 billion EUR at the end of 2014 and actually dropped to 313 billion EUR in the first quarter of 2015. Syriza was elected to power on January 25, 2015.

Those awful conditions developed under years of austerity government, after years of profligacy,  which Syriza promised to end. Now that Syriza has been forced to double down on austerity, expect conditions in Greece to worsen dramatically without debt forgiveness or a generational period of grace from repayment obligations. 

Little discussed in that regard, however, is the fact that in 2014 Greece is said to have paid an interest rate on its debts of 4% nominal and 2.6% effective.  This is happening in a world where the ECB has just decided to keep the headline lending rate at the record low level of 0.05%.

Whatever else may be said, Euro Group creditors by comparison are making a killing off Greece's predicament: almost 13 billion EUR in debt service revenues in 2014 alone.

If Europe is serious about keeping Greece in the Group, maybe it could start by stopping the profiteering.

Greece left in a permanent debt trap under neo-colonial rule after historic weekend showdown in Brussels

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, here:

The crushed Syriza leader [Alexis Tsipras] must sell a settlement that leaves Greece in a permanent debt trap, under neo-colonial control, and so economically fragile that it is almost guaranteed to crash into a fresh crisis in the next global downturn or European recession.

Alexis Tsipras sought out the help of Yanis Varoufakis starting in 2010, but never fully agreed with him

Varoufakis' plan, as outlined here in an interview in The New Statesman, was never embraced by Syriza as it needed to be to have even a chance of succeeding:

[Yanis Varoufakis] said he spent the past month warning the Greek cabinet that the ECB would close Greece’s banks to force a deal. When they did, he was prepared to do three things: issue euro-denominated IOUs; apply a “haircut” to the bonds Gree[ce] issued to the ECB in 2012, reducing Greece’s debt; and seize control of the Bank of Greece from the ECB. ... As the crowds were celebrating on Sunday night in Syntagma Square, Syriza’s six-strong inner cabinet held a critical vote. By four votes to two, Varoufakis failed to win support for his plan, and couldn’t convince Tsipras. He had wanted to enact his “triptych” of measures earlier in the week, when the ECB first forced Greek banks to shut. Sunday night was his final attempt. When he lost his departure was inevitable.

So what Bernard-Henri Levy and the EU really want is to tax the bejeebers out of Greek capital and the Greek church

BHL with celebrated child rapist

Venting his deconstructionist spleen, here:

Mr. Tsipras might defend his approach to the referendum by asserting that his goal was not so much to sound out the people as to reinforce his position in the confrontation with Greece’s creditors. But what is the justification for that confrontation? That creditors had the audacity to demand progress toward the rule of law and social justice, as well as efforts to tame Greece’s shipping magnates and its tax-avoiding clergy?

Evidently plank eight of Syriza's 40-point program is just window-dressing to BHL and isn't evidence that the goals of the EU and of Syriza in this regard are quite the same:

"8. Abolition of financial privileges for the Church and shipbuilding industry."

The French Jew and self-identified leftist and critic of the left has a passel of divergent opinions and loyalties, including to Roman Polanski, Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Nicolas Sarkozy, but Tsipras' real offense to Levy is that, so far, he has been insufficiently anti-Christian.