A radical left party? The ideology of SYRIZA

Abstract

The purpose of this paper was to find out the ideological stance of the Greek ruling party SYRIZA in comparison to socialism and social democracy. This comparison was used to determine whether the possible radicalness of SYRIZA lies in the party’s rejection of the politics of austerity or are there features in SYRIZA’s ideology which make the party substantially extreme left. The hypothesis formulated at the beginning of this thesis suggested that compared to socialism and social democracy, SYRIZA’s ideological stance is not radical – if anything, the radicalness of the party is expressed in its opposition to austerity politics. In my view, this hypothesis proved to be correct and thus the ideological closeness of SYRIZA to classical leftist ideologies was confirmed. The essence of SYRIZA’s positions and proposals are found in Table 1 which plainly demonstrates the party’s socialist and social democratic roots. Thus, the central conclusion of this paper is that ideologically, SYRIZA is not a radical party. True, it uses Marxist rhetoric, is anti-elite and severely criticises neoliberalism, but it is not seeking to stage a revolution to abolish the capitalist system. The party’s proposed measures regarding social welfare, equality, reforms in the public sector or sustainable development are not essentially radical. If anything, the radicalness of SYRIZA lies in the party’s opposition to the politics of austerity. One dimension missing from this paper is SYRIZA’s use of populism. The way the party deploys populist rhetoric and to what extent is definitely a possible topic for future research. Another fascinating option would be to compare SYRIZA to the anti-austerity movements and parties in other countries, some of which were mentioned in the discussion part of this paper.