SYRIZA: If a conference cannot be held due to a pandemic, then how can elections be held?

By Niki Zorba

The third congress of SYRIZA, the one that will put a “seal” on the enlargement of the official opposition party, its “transformation”, about which Alexis Tsipras himself had spoken on the very night of SYRIZA’s defeat (and) in the national 2019 elections, for two years now hovering between scenarios as to whether, how and when it should take place.

Time and background

After various “hot” episodes and contingencies (should or should not be done, how and with what “distribution” of beans between the majority and the minority (“Umbrella”) in that famous secret meeting of the president of SYRIZA At the end of September, the conditions and the time were agreed with top party officials at Flampourari’s house: Congress in February and not in December – and as a “restraint” move against KINAL, which had planned its internal party procedures for the succession.

It should be noted that at that time, the feeling that we were coming out of the tunnel of the pandemic was dominant, therefore the programming exercises of SYRIZA were not directly threatened by the mutations and the “evil” that followed.

From the beginning of December due to Delta and immediately after I say Omicron, the whispers “how to make a conference with this epidemiological data” had started to become “voices” in the Syriza ecosystem but from the central ones were constantly staying: We proceed according to the planning and schedule we have set. Of course if the epidemiological conditions do not allow it then we will see how we will cope. However, we must be ready.

Hence, just a few days before Christmas, SYRIZA held not one but two meetings of the Political Council, with agenda issues organizational of the conference, with the first, in fact, on December 22, to be held in an internally tense climate, between paschal executives, “bridges”, presidents and Umbrella executives, for the physiognomy of the party.

No conference but … yes in elections?

Throughout the last 30 days, a product of time and mainly the product of the alarm for the new mutation that erupted in the front of the pandemic, the feeling that the plan for the holding of the Conference between February 24-27 may need to be adjusted, lurked in every discussion.

“No cancellation, probably an adjustment, depending on the epidemiological challenges that the country will face”, was the constant signal that Koumoundourou emitted and continues to emit, under the “baguette” of Alexis Tsipras.

The possibility is no longer treated “phobically” if the conditions due to the coronation do not allow the conference to take place for life, to follow a “mixed” format: There was also the pan-Hellenic conference in July in SYRIZA, which took place purely digitally.

The resurgence of scenarios in the last days regarding the cancellation, postponement, etc. of the third congress collides, among other things, with a new element in the equation that SYRIZA is called upon to solve: Alexis Tsipras has called for elections “here and now”. If his party cancels its original conference plans due to a pandemic, it will have to be convincingly explained that a congress can not be held but … elections can be held.