On a warm May evening in Thiseio, under the Acropolis, Alexis Tsipras returned to the center of Greek politics. Former prime minister and former leader of Syriza DESIGNATED Greek Left Alliance, marking his return after three years away from front-line politics. His return follows Syriza’s crushing defeat in the 2023 general election, when New Democracy secured a landslide victory and reduced the party that once promised to transform Greece to a diminished force on the fringes of power.
The presentation was carefully crafted to project renewal and trust. Even the party’s acronym, Elas, carries historical weight, echoing the Greek People’s Liberation Army, the communist-led resistance force during the Axis occupation. Early polls suggest Tsipras’ new formation is already gaining momentum, helped by the gap that has defined Greek opposition politics since 2023. The right-wing New Democracy and Kyriakos Mitsotakis have governed with limited parliamentary pressure, while parties to their left have been weakened by serious internal conflicts. Tsipras is now trying to reclaim that space.
However, his new initiative carries heavy baggage. Tsipras is once again presenting himself as a figure who can save and reorganize. Many on the Greek left view him with deep suspicion. For them, Tsipras is associated with a long record of divisions and betrayals, from the austerity turn of 2015 to the collapse of Syriza after 2023. His new party may be packaged as a fresh start, but the question it raises is an old one: is Tsipras here to rebuild the left or finish the job of breaking it?
His career can be read as a story of uninterrupted fragmentation. In 2013, Syriza went from a coalition of parties and trends to a single, unitary party, a change that strengthened his leadership by leaving the internal currents, especially the Left Platform, increasingly exposed. But the deepest divide came in 2015. After winning office with an anti-austerity mandate, Tsipras called the infamous referendum in which 61 percent voted against creditors’ terms, only to I accept a third bailout days later. For much of Syriza’s left faction, this was experienced as a double betrayal: they were asked to defend a radical mandate that was then abandoned, and the result of the referendum they had mobilized for was effectively set aside. of separate what followed was the moment when Tsipras’ leftist era officially reached its sad end.
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After losing the 2019 European elections, the 2019 general election and both rounds of Greece’s double election in 2023, Tsipras resigned from the leadership and left Syriza to enter a succession race without any serious reckoning with the disaster he had overseen. Into that void stepped Stefanos Kasselakis, a former Goldman Sachs associate and political unknown whose campaign, built around a viral personal brand, was toxic by leftist standards. He defeated Effie Achtsioglou, the former labor minister widely seen as the party’s succession candidate, in September 2023 and almost immediately made Syriza look like a failure. BEGINNING.
Deputies and senior figures left, a new one separate and in November 2024, Syriza became official LOST Its status as the main opposition to Pasok as its parliamentary group fell to 29 MPs. For more than two years, Tsipras quietly watched his party burn as he orchestrated his personal re-election (no, really). He received a political scholarship in Harvardthen waited until October 2025 to resign as MP. Even that supposed withdrawal from politics lasted less than eight months. Basically, the performance does not suggest a man trying to break away from the past. However, Elas now leaves Syriza in an almost impossible position. It could fade into Tsipras’ new project or survive as a shell of the party that once defined it. Each path leads to another split in the Greek left.
This is why so much is relied upon in the symbolism of Ela. It arrives at the memory of the leftist resistance, while the language of the new project is borrowed from the right. During the launch, Tsipras talked about border security, ended his appeal with a “new patriotism” and framed unity through national language elastic enough to reassure just about anyone. He wants the loyalty of his former comrades without having to repair the wreckage he left behind. Not surprisingly, some of his former allies are already tackling the project with him contempt.
Greek politics has moved forward since Tsipras stepped down in 2023, but not in the direction he might have hoped. New Democracy has survived in part by keeping alive the memory of Syriza’s years in office as a warning: this, Mitsotakis insists, is what Greece must never return to. Many voters accepted this argument in 2023, when he won by a margin large enough to make the left look not just defeated but discredited. Since then, the government has been hit by financial scandals and accusations of state corruption. However, none of this has produced the collapse that its opponents expected.
Many Greeks who once looked left for an answer no longer do so. The extreme right parties are gaining groundwith recent polls suggesting they command close to a quarter of the electorate between them. Tsipras’ comeback could have started with humility and an attempt to repair what he broke. Instead, he offers another act of messianism without any serious attempt to connect.
What Tsipras fails to see here is the wider damage he inflicted on the Greek left itself. His record turned many people away from progressive politics altogether. The anti-austerity pledge was killed by the same leader who had vowed to end the memos, Greece’s creditor-imposed bailout, only for his government to abandon the social forces that had brought it to power. The result is a political fatigue that still permeates Greek society, with each new schism re-opening the same painful memory.
Ernesto Laclau’s old line on political identification feels especially relevant now that Tsipras is back. In moments of fragmentation, he argued, unity can be produced through a name: “the name is the basis of the thing.” Tsipras is trying to make his name carry the weight of a left that no longer knows how to rally, and his comeback requires people to treat his record as a fresh start. Many people see a familiar figure return to the ruins he created, seeking once again to be treated as the only man who can repair them.
(Further reading: Labor’s war of words)
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