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When a young girl appears on stage and presents Alexis Tsipras with a slip of paper the evening comes to a symbolic climax. A video had just been screened after a 40-minute speech by the former leftist Prime Minister of Greece in which that same slip of paper was passed from a doctor to a farmer, and then to an office worker, a shop clerk and finally back into the hands of the girl. The event is leaning heavily into symbolism: Against the backdrop of the Acropolis and before thousands of spectators, Tsipras will announce the name of a new leftist party – the Greek Left Alliance, or ELAS for short.
But this was not just the launch of yet another party in an already divided system – it was an attempt to fill the political void left by the lack of a credible, progressive opposition to Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s conservative Nea Dimokratia (ND) party. A void that has only grown since Tsipras stepped back from the political stage.
The fact that Tsipras in particular is claiming this space for himself complicates things. He is, after all, an emblem of both the biggest resurgence of the Greek left since the end of the military dictatorship as well as its worst defeat. After years of government debt crisis after the 2008 crash left the country in tatters economically, socially, and politically, many in Greece and abroad had associated Syriza, Tsipras’s former radical leftist party, with the promise of a different future.
Alexis Tsipras is an emblem of both the biggest resurgence of the Greek left since the end of the military dictatorship as well as its worst defeat.
This promise, however, came up hard against the power of the creditors, who forced the country into a clearing sale. With his 2015 referendum victory, Tsipras gave elites, including Angela Merkel as she notes in her memoirs, a bit of a scare. However, this new beginning never saw the light of day, and the 2023 electoral defeat definitively concluded a political era that had emerged from times of crisis.
The Bitter Legacy of 2015’s Oxi Referendum
After Tsipras stepped down, Syriza splintered into smaller groups, with former allies trying their luck in parliament. Former Speaker of Parliament Zoe Konstantopoulou, for example, founded the Course of Freedom party (Pfetsi Eleftherias), at one point polling in the double digits. Former Minister of Finance, Yanis Varoufakis, founded MERA25 but ultimately failed to make it into parliament. Former Labour Minister Efi Achtsioglou also co-founded the New Left (Nea Aristera), which split from the Syriza faction but fell into obscurity.
Meanwhile, the social democratic PASOK became the largest opposition party, though more out of necessity than their own merit, gaining relevance not because they had tapped into a new dynamic in society, but simply because Syriza had imploded. For years, the Greek left has resembled a field of ruins, even while Mitsotakis’s conservative government produced scandal after scandal: a wire-tapping affair, dragging its feet in investigating the Tempi train accident, an EU agricultural subsidy scandal, and an ever more apparent discrepancy between the government’s supposed macroeconomic “success story” and the everyday life of most citizens.
Tsipras spotted a long-awaited opportunity in this vacuum. First he focused on founding the Alexis Tsipras Institute to promote the debate of social and political topics, from environmental issues to artificial intelligence. More recently, the publication of his 2025 memoir Ithaca – tellingly named after Odysseus’s homeland – revealed that he had never given up on the idea of making a comeback.
For years, the Greek left has resembled a field of ruins, even while Mitsotakis’s conservative government produced scandal after scandal.
Now Tsipras wants to create a centralised party guided not by internal currents but through “dialogue with citizens”. His new attempt begins both with new faces, including the recently appointed Theoni Koufonikolakou, a lawyer and former Deputy Ombudswoman for Children's Rights, as media spokesperson, and long-trusted allies such as former Syriza representative Miltos Chatzigiannakis, who is taking over the position of Secretary of the Political Commission.
Both belong to the 11-person National Council currently leading this new initiative. The council also includes Dionisis Temponeras, who, in conversation with the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung, explained why he decided to join Tsipras’s new project after resigning from his position with Syriza in 2025: “I stayed in the party [after Tsipras’s resignation] to achieve a single goal: to try to bring leftist and progressive powers to an understanding. Ultimately, I was not successful for various reasons, be it the isolation of certain parties or political vanity.”
It's self-evident, says Temponeras, that Tsipras must be the one to lead this attempt. Tsipras evinces political maturity because he has never been embroiled in any scandal. Tsipras also has a lot of experience under his belt – he was the only person who tried to manage the country’s bankruptcy and remove Greece from the Memoranda of Understanding.
Other leftist powers have been critical of his comeback. Iro Dioti, the coordinator of MERA25’s central committee who left Syriza after Tsipras’s capitulation to the creditors, believes that “Mr. Tsipras had been counting on the complete dissolution of his political camp in June of 2023 in order to then reappear as its saviour later on.” According to Dioti, his generic platitudes would not address any of the root causes of today’s problems: “How could they when at the root of these problems lie the very policies that Mr. Tsipras has put forward?” For Dioti, “his return will simply lead the Mitsotakis camp to close its ranks, and has little to do with the left and its factions, who are the ones that should be carrying this out. After all, that is not Mr. Tsipras’s job anyway.”
A New Left Patriotism
The name ELAS inevitably conjures up memories of the EAM-ELAS, the Greek People’s Liberation Army that fought the German occupation. The acronym also sounds like Hellas (Greece), and critics point out that the Greek police force is also called ELAS. None of this is by accident. In fact, the former Prime Minister’s communications team has already achieved its first goal: to get people talking about the party.
In any case, the name reveals that Tsipras wants to do more than just build an electoral platform – he also wants to make a historic bid to restore the left’s potential for hegemony. Central to this new narrative is the creation of a “national compass” via a new kind of leftist patriotism. Greece, he argues, needs “a moral revolution” that responds to the need for a sovereign and democratic Greece. However, it is important to consider the social spin that this concept has taken. This new patriotism is to be based on the “the non-negotiable dedication of all to the country”, as well as “support for all individuals, without any form of discrimination” and limits on the “arbitrary power of the oligarchy” and the “subordination of the state to oligarchical interests”.
Temponeras disagrees with the assessment that the need for patriotism is merely a tactical shift. “The left has always been patriotic,” he says, “and it has proven this through the battles it has fought for the liberation of the people and the nation during times of opposition and occupation.” He continues by saying that the left has “obviously also opposed military dictatorship”, and has taken responsibility at decisive moments throughout Greece’s history. It is therefore not the concept of patriotism itself that is problematic, but the way it can be manipulated politically down the line. “Because the left surrendered [patriotism] to the right,” says Temponeras, it has “unfortunately become loaded with nationalistic significance. This is something that must change.”
The new party’s name ELAS reveals that Tsipras wants to do more than just build an electoral platform – he also wants to make a historic bid to restore the left’s potential for hegemony.
To support this argument, Temponeras singles out one of the most important personalities of the Communist-influenced resistance against German occupation: “I remember Aris Velouchiotis speaking about the need to defend the country against the enemy. He said that we need to defend our ‘terraced fields’ – in other words our villages, our houses, our homeland, our people, our world.” In contemporary terms, Temponeras interprets this as defending “our borders and right to sovereignty of course, [...] but especially the security and welfare of all citizens.” If a country is to be strong geopolitically, he claims, it must “first be economically and socially strong at the domestic level”.
Writing in the Greek daily Kathimerini, historian Kostis Karpozilos, who previously belonged to the New Left, argued that Tsipras’s success will depend on “the extent to which he succeeds in shifting the debate towards social issues and holding the right responsible for very specific realities: the cost of living, rent prices, working conditions in the private sector, and the absurd fact that 10 percent of the population possesses 50 percent of the country’s wealth.” The 2026 social crisis, he claims, is not the result of external pressures, as was the case during the memoranda. The current inequality is much more a question of national policy decisions. In Karpozilos’s words, “What divides us today is not our relationship to nationhood, but our wages, the privileges that we enjoy, and the prospects that lie ahead for each of us.”
Can the Fractured Left Unite?
Recent polling suggest ELAS’s messaging is resonating: ELAS surpassed PASOK and now ranks second, with 14 to 15 percent of the intended vote share. That said, the ND is still a further 10 to 15 percentage points ahead. Syriza dropped down to 1 to 2 percent and Course of Freedom to around 5 percent, with MERA25 still polling at 2 to 3 percent and the New Left below 1 percent. The New Left is showing clear signs of complete disbandment after a huge exodus of senior leaders.
Tsipras himself points out that while Syriza never succeeded in uniting the left, he did manage to rally citizens around a shift in political direction. ELAS is hoping to ride the same wave by providing common ground for the radical left, social democrats, and environmentalists.
Meanwhile, “unity” itself has become a contested term. Varoufakis contrasts the concept of enallagi, “replacing” the government, with the notion of epanaktisi: the “reclaiming” of public goods, democratic control and any economic instruments that have been surrendered to oligarchic powers or to the market. For Dioti, red lines also include “abolishing the energy exchange, returning the electricity company and the railway to public ownership and control, confronting cartels, lowering VAT, and banning the forced auctioning of primary residences as well as the extraction of raw materials.” She adds, “Anything else may be a sign of ‘unity’, but it would certainly not be ‘leftist’.”
Gabriel Sakellaridis, General Secretary of the New Left and former government spokesman under Tsipras, rejects the approach of uniting people around well-known personalities. For him, unity cannot be understood as a “messianic” search for a saviour or simply aggregating political parties, but rather as a collective political project.
The relevance of these criticisms put forth by leading representatives of MERA25 and the New Left, parties that are hemorrhaging personnel and polling terribly will become apparent by the next election.
Prime Minister Mitsotakis Squeezed from Both Sides
Prime Minister Mitsotakis currently finds himself under pressure not only from the left, but also from the right. Speculations about a new party led by former Prime Minister Antonis Samaras prove that the ND could lose votes from more than just the centre. Samaras stands for a conservative rightwing faction that views Mitsotakis’s modernisation plans and reluctance to take a confrontational stance on big national issues very critically. Should Samaras actually found a party, it would attract voters immediately to the right of the ND, particularly conservative voters who are critical of Mitsotakis but reluctant to switch to the far-right Greek Solution (Elliniki Lysi) . Because the Greek electoral system awards majority bonuses, even small losses can foil prospects of an outright majority government.
Another new party is creating even bigger worries for Mitsotakis: Hope for Democracy (Elpida gia ti Dimokrati), led by Maria Karystianou whose daughter Marthi was one of the 57 victims of the 2023 Tempi train accident. Karystianou had previously come to be a central figure in the protest movement as head of an association representing the victims’ families. Her party, currently polling at around 10 percent, combines fighting corruption with conservative, right-wing positions.
Because the Greek electoral system awards majority bonuses, even small losses can foil prospects of an outright majority government.
The next parliamentary elections are set to take place no later than 2027. Even though Mitsotakis has repeatedly rejected the idea of an early election, the political dynamics are unfolding as they would during an election campaign already. A final decision on the election is not expected until the end of summer, depending on how the forest fire season goes and how Mitsotakis’s political rivals develop. A later election date could reinforce Mitsotakis’s carefully cultivated image as a guarantor of stability. Nevertheless, pressure is mounting, and not just in parliament which is increasingly failing to accurately reflect the country’s political landscape, with 40 of its 300 seats now held by independent MPs.
Translated from German by Guerilla Media Collective
