Written by Akis Liantzouras
SYRIZA today does not need political analysis; it needs an autopsy. The party that once frightened the system, brought PASOK to its knees, had the Right on the ropes and entered the Maximos Mansion now resembles an old nightclub on a Sunday morning: chairs on the tables, two regulars arguing about who is to blame, and someone in the back insisting that ‘there are still people here.’
And in the middle of these ruins, Rena Dourou appears.
Her mission is not to ‘reorganise’ SYRIZA. Those are conference words, there to pass the time while professionals of party melancholy nod along. Her real job is much dirtier: to prove that SYRIZA has a reason to exist without Alexis Tsipras.
And that is where the carnival begins. Tsipras is not merely a former leader. He is the political DNA of post-junta SYRIZA itself. He is the man who took a protest party and made it a government. You cannot erase him without amputating yourself. Yet if you keep carrying his photograph around like an icon, you are already dead.
That is Dourou’s Gordian knot: to de-Tsiprasise SYRIZA without turning the party into a club of bitter former Tsipras comrades. And, strangely enough, she may be the right woman for the wrong job.
Dourou is a political animal. She has taken mud, defeats, front pages, television courtrooms and party knives. She did not come from a leadership seminar. She comes from the real Greek political slaughterhouse. Today, that is an asset.
But if she thinks it is enough to reunite the old guard, we have lost.
SYRIZA did not die because one faction quarrelled with another. It died because society grew tired of watching people who cannot fill a taxi spend hours discussing who represents the people better. Meanwhile, the people were paying electricity bills, rent and cutting back at the supermarket. And they were holding a conference.
If Dourou wants to do real damage to the political system, she has to make SYRIZA a party of the street again, not a panel party. She must speak to the forty-year-old who works and remains poor; to the small business owner who fears the tax office more than the competition; to the mother counting money until the end of the month while television explains to her that the economy is doing wonderfully. That is where politics is. Not in Central Committees.
And the crucial point: facing Tsipras, she must neither kneel nor shoot. She has to say the hardest thing in politics: ‘You were our history. You are not our future.’
If she dares to do it, SYRIZA may rise again. If not, they should stop looking for a reconstruction plan and start looking for the person with the keys to turn off the lights.