With spikes against the president Stefanos Kasselakis, the majority of the members of the Thessaloniki Youth leave SYRIZA.

Here is the text of the announcement:

“The defeat of SYRIZA in the recent national elections brought to the surface a series of problems that existed in the party, which today have taken the form of an unprecedented crisis. The crisis concerns all levels: strategy, political mobilization, decision-making processes, alliances, and even the very identity and positioning of the party. Faced with these facts, every party and youth organization must position itself and redefine its role and position.

SYRIZA was the only left-wing venture in post-war Europe that managed to find itself in the position of government. During the period of the economic crisis, the dominant forces sought to get out of it by attacking the world of work, developing in full intensity a neoliberal project, as expressed by the memorandums. SYRIZA managed to organize the resistances, to express them politically and also to propose an alternative plan for exiting the crisis. The result of this strategy was the first government of the Left. The overwhelming correlation of power, however, led to a painful compromise and the implementation of the 3rd memorandum. Nevertheless, maintaining the government allowed important small and large victories. The reduction of poverty and inequalities, important steps in rights policy, the Prespa agreement, etc. it’s only a few moments.

The 2019 defeat found SYRIZA having lost a significant part of its electoral power and cut off from sections of society and movements. The wrong analysis of the causes of the defeat led to an equally wrong new strategy, as expressed by the so-called organizational and political “enlargement”. In essence, this was nothing more than an attempt at political openness towards the failed prescriptions of the center, and a welding of mechanisms from above. These led to the transformation of SYRIZA from a party of the radical Left to a pluralist party without a clear political identity. A party was created with an unclear stigma regarding the social groups and political audiences it aimed to express.

At the same time, the leader-centered address, the absence of the party from kinetic processes and the liquidation of its structures, deprived it of the possibility of interaction with society and the dynamics that developed. The result of this was that SYRIZA was unable to perceive the social movement and much more to influence it, while at the very base of the party there was no plan of organized intervention in society.

After the 2023 election defeats there was an opportunity to have an honest discussion and reflection on the course of the party. We were denied once again. Although the results of the internal party elections that followed disappointed us, the reality exceeded our worst fears.

One of the first moves of the new leadership was the appointment of new people to positions of responsibility and the announcement of deletions from social media, bypassing the party’s institutions and collective processes altogether. The unmediated leader-people relationship, with the marginalization of representative bodies, is not a superior form of democracy, but the quintessence of a dangerous populism.

The credibility and seriousness of the space is constantly affected, as we witness public positions that go against the determined positions of the party, such as the speech of the new President in BSE, the announcement of the party on Palestine, but also the gradual deconstruction of his government tenure SYRIZA by absorbing arguments of the anti-SYRIZA front.

The highlight was the speech of the new President in which he proposed holding a referendum in relation to the deletions. His speech at K.E. it was a divisive position, insulting the history and struggles of the area, and confirming an authoritarian operating model of the new leadership, where only one point of view prevails, the one expressed by the president.

For the above reasons, it is understood that today’s SYRIZA is not a space for synthesizing different views and traditions of the left, it cannot be the space for an alternative political plan that will express the contemporary concerns and claims of the new generation and those who are subjected to all kinds of exploitation.

In the end, we are not willing and ready to give an alibi with our presence to the final mutation of the party and we leave the party we served and was once in the vanguard of the kinetic and ruling Left.

Punctuality, the climate crisis, the housing crisis, gender discrimination and the authoritarianism of the New Democracy government are just some of the issues that concern the social majority and the new generation. The formation of a strong pole of the ecological and radical left that fights for social and feminist emancipation and democracy is a necessity for the immediate response to today’s disputes. For our part, we will actively contribute to this effort, fighting for the social groups from which we come and which we want to represent. As long as the majority is oppressed and suffers, claims and struggles will be born, collective demands will be born. The left was born in these social processes, in them it will meet again”.