Greece’s Coalition of the Radical Left, Syriza, has lost most of its parliamentary group after a wave of MPs walked out to follow former prime minister Alexis Tsipras into his new party.
Andreas Panagiotopoulos, the MP for Achaea, and Giorgos Gavrilos, the MP for Argolis, each wrote to parliament speaker Nikitas Kaklamanis on July 14 to say they were quitting the group and would sit as independents.
As many as 14 of Syriza’s 23 MPs were preparing to take the same step. That would leave the party below the 10-seat minimum parliament sets for a recognised parliamentary group.
Tsipras launched the Greek Left Alliance (ELAS) in Athens on May 26, three years after he quit as Syriza leader in the wake of the party’s defeat in the June 2023 election.
The walkout was triggered on July 11, when Syriza’s central committee overturned a June 6 decision to back Tsipras’s venture and resolved to contest the next election on its own ballot.
Party president Sokratis Famellos had already resigned on July 8 as defections mounted. A faction grouped around Pavlos Polakis, Nikos Pappas and former Attica governor Rena Dourou has since taken control of the party machine.
Polakis, reinstated to the parliamentary group by the same July 11 vote, said on Mega TV on July 14 that he would seek its presidency. He described the earlier decision to endorse a rival party as without precedent anywhere in world politics.
The manoeuvring is being fought over a shrinking prize. A GPO poll published in June put Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s New Democracy on 29.4 per cent and ELAS second on 16.3 per cent, with Syriza on 1.2 per cent, well below the 3 per cent threshold for entering parliament.
Syriza took 36.3 per cent of the vote in January 2015 on a pledge to tear up the bailout terms set by Greece’s creditors in the European Union and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). It signed a third rescue programme seven months later, and has been shedding members ever since.
Nea Aristera (New Left), founded by 11 Syriza MPs who broke away in December 2023, lost its own parliamentary group in June after seven of its lawmakers resigned. Several of them have since gravitated towards Tsipras.
The centre-left PASOK, polling around 11 per cent, remains Greece’s official opposition and would face any Tsipras vehicle for the leadership of the left.
Syriza governed for four years and returned 47 MPs as recently as 2023. It approaches the next election, due in 2027, as a rump of nine lawmakers polling barely above 1 per cent.
