Written by Akis Liantzouras
Somewhere in a party office there must still be an old folder marked “Tsipras” in red pen. It is opened when things become difficult: 2015, Varoufakis, closed banks, the referendum, illusions — all laid out on the table in the hope that the old machine will start again. But the machine now makes the sound of an old refrigerator just before it gives up. Alexis Tsipras may be second today, but the latest Interview poll placed him at 14.5%, against New Democracy at 26.5%; in June the same firm had put him at 16% and New Democracy at 31.2%. Behind him sit PASOK, Greek Solution and a broken mosaic of parties, leaders, anger and political loneliness. That is the problem another photograph from 2015 cannot solve: to genuinely fear the second-place candidate, you must first believe he can become first.
New Democracy is not facing an army. It is facing small detachments firing in different directions. Tsipras draws part of the old centre-left; PASOK is still trying to tell where seriousness ends and boredom begins; Velopoulos works the emotions to the right; the Communist Party does what it has always done; and smaller parties float around them like little boats after a shipwreck. The most striking fact in the August survey is not even the runner-up. It is that undecided voters and “another party” together reach 16.6%. There is an entire political neighbourhood without an address. New Democracy remains the largest apartment block, but its flats are emptying. A majority is not won because the building manager opposite has fewer tenants. You need a reason for your own people to get off the sofa. You need intensity, stakes and — as political history quietly teaches — the fact that big consolidations are built not only around what people love, but also against what they fear.
Viktor Orbán learned this better than anyone. After his landslide victory in 2010, he had crushed the political opposition so thoroughly that it was no longer frightening enough. His advisers Arthur Finkelstein and George Birnbaum, according to Birnbaum’s later account, looked outside the usual party arena. Their logic was cynical: when the real opponent is not enough to keep your people together, you need an enemy larger than the opponent. They settled on George Soros — known, wealthy, international, ideologically opposed to Orbán and, crucially, without his own electoral ticket. In Birnbaum’s account, Soros became the “perfect enemy.”
Then something more interesting than a negative advertisement happened. Soros ceased to be Soros and became a container. Brussels, migration, NGOs, liberals, globalisation, elites and the sense that “someone decides for us without us” were poured into it. One face, a hundred fears. Orbán did not need to explain seventeen different conflicts each morning; he had found the face onto which he could project the whole wall. In 2018, Fidesz won 49.27% of the list vote and 133 of 199 seats. Soros was plainly not the only cause — there was the economy, the electoral system, media power, migration and the state machine — but the communication architecture was clear: Hungary was not simply voting for Orbán. It was voting for a wall against something.
New Democracy therefore has to look in the mirror without powder. Tsipras cannot easily play this role. He is known, polarising and carries heavy political memory, but he is inside the system. We have seen him as prime minister, seen him lose, seen him leave and return. He is not an invisible danger beyond the walls; he is the old neighbour who changed his doorbell. You may dislike him and not want to see him in Maximos again. But at 14–16%, it is difficult to sell him as a political Godzilla coming to step on Athens. People have eyes. At some point even fear requires credibility.
If we read the problem coldly in an AWGMeta strategy room, the question would not be how to reheat anti-SYRIZA sentiment. That meal has been through the microwave three times. The question would be: what major conflict could once again organise the governing camp into “us and them”? Not which person to hang on a poster — that is where crudity begins and strategy ends — but which political fault line is real enough, large enough and close enough to everyday life to contain security, the economy, geopolitics, institutions, identity and the question of who governs tomorrow morning. That is the difference between a strategic adviser and a slogan-maker. The latter looks for an ugly photograph; the former looks for the conflict already boiling beneath the asphalt.
What New Democracy lacks today is not an opponent. Opponents are available by the kilo. What it lacks is the Opponent with a capital O: the political symbol that makes ten different fears feel like one battle and gives voters the sense that the ballot is not an accounting exercise but a crossroads. Orbán found Soros. New Democracy is still pointing at an old photograph of Tsipras. And a parliamentary majority, however closely you inspect it with a polling magnifying glass, is not frightened by old photographs.