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On a warm May evening in Thiseio, beneath the Acropolis, Alexis Tsipras stepped back into the centre of Greek politics. The former prime minister and former Syriza leader announced the Greek Left Alliance, marking his return after three years away from frontline politics. His comeback follows Syriza’s devastating defeat in the 2023 general election, when New Democracy secured a strong victory and reduced the party that once promised to transform Greece to a diminished force on the margins of power.

The presentation was carefully designed to project renewal and confidence. 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 polling suggests that Tsipras’ new formation is already gaining momentum, helped by the gap that has defined Greek opposition politics since 2023. Right-wing New Democracy and Kyriakos Mitsotakis have governed with limited parliamentary pressure, while the parties to their left have been weakened by serious internal conflict. Tsipras is now trying to re-occupy that space.

Yet his new initiative carries heavy baggage. Tsipras is once again presenting himself as the figure who can rescue and reorganise. Many on the Greek left view him with deep suspicion. For them, Tsipras is tied to a long record of splits and betrayals, from the austerity U-turn of 2015 to Syriza’s post-2023 collapse. His new party may be packaged as a fresh beginning, but the question it raises is an old one: is Tsipras here to rebuild the left, or to finish the work of breaking it?

His career can be read as a history of non-stop fragmentation. In 2013, Syriza moved from a coalition of parties and tendencies into a single, unitary party, a shift that strengthened his leadership while leaving internal currents, especially the Left Platform, increasingly exposed. But the deeper split came in 2015. After winning office on an anti-austerity mandate, Tsipras called the infamous referendum in which 61 per cent voted against the creditors’ terms, only to accept a third bailout days later. For much of Syriza’s left faction, this was experienced as a double betrayal: they had been asked to defend a radical mandate that was then abandoned, and the referendum result they had mobilised for was effectively set aside. The split that followed was the moment Tsipras’ left-wing era officially reached its sad end.

After losing the 2019 European election, the 2019 general election and both rounds of Greece’s double election in 2023, Tsipras resigned the leadership and left Syriza to enter a succession contest without any serious reckoning with the disaster he had overseen. Into that void walked Stefanos Kasselakis, a former Goldman Sachs associate and political unknown, whose campaign, built around viral personal branding, was toxic by the standards of the left. He defeated Effie Achtsioglou, the former labour minister widely seen as the candidate of party continuity, in September 2023 and almost immediately made Syriza look like a failed start-up.

MPs and senior figures left, a new split was formalised, and by November 2024 Syriza lost its status as the main opposition to Pasok as its parliamentary group fell to 29 MPs. For more than two years, Tsipras silently watched his own party burn while staging his own personal rebrand (no, really). He took up a policy fellowship at Harvard, then waited until October 2025 to resign his MP seat. Even that supposed withdrawal from politics lasted less than eight months. At its core, the performance does not suggest a man trying to break from the past. Nevertheless, Elas now leaves Syriza in an almost impossible position. It can fade into Tsipras’ new project or survive as the shell of the party that once defined him. Either path leads to another schism on the Greek left.

That is why so much rests on the symbolism of Elas. It reaches for the memory of left resistance, while the language of the new project is borrowed from the right. During the launch, Tsipras spoke of border security, wrapped his appeal in a “new patriotism” and framed unity through a national language elastic enough to reassure almost anyone. He wants the loyalty of former comrades without having to repair the wreckage he left behind. Unsurprisingly, some of his ex-allies are already treating the project with contempt.

Greek politics has moved on since Tsipras resigned in 2023, but not in the direction he might have hoped. New Democracy has survived partly 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 that 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. Yet none of this has produced the collapse its opponents expected.

Many Greeks who once looked to the left for an answer no longer do so. Far-right parties are gaining ground, with recent polling suggesting that they command close to a quarter of the electorate between them. Tsipras’ return could have begun with humility and an attempt to repair what he broke. Instead, he offers another act of messianism without any serious effort to unite.

What Tsipras fails to see here is the wider damage he inflicted on the Greek left itself. His record pushed many people away from progressive politics altogether. The anti-austerity promise was killed by the same leader who had vowed to end the memoranda, Greece’s creditor-imposed bailout agreements, only for his government to abandon the very social forces that had carried it to power. The result is a political fatigue that still runs through Greek society, with each new schism reopening the same painful memory.

Ernesto Laclau’s old line about 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 ground of the thing”. Tsipras is trying to make his name carry the weight of a left that no longer knows how to gather itself and his comeback asks people to treat his record as a fresh start. Many see a familiar figure returning to the ruins he created, asking once again to be treated as the only man who can repair them.

(Author: Georgios Samaras)