Following a year of unprecedented mass mobilizations against the attempts by the New Democracy right wing government to introduce privatization of higher education by a special law and by constitutional changes, the ruling party and the entire bourgeois political system faces an enormous crisis of legitimacy. This crisis was exacerbated by a series of major financial scandals affecting directly State and government officials. Political tensions are rapidly building up and New Democracy's Prime Minister Karamanlis seriously considers the eventuality to call early elections next fall.
All political parties are already within the maelstrom of an undeclared electoral period, with meetings and rallies taking place in the main cities all over the country. The same electoral fever affects also the scattered forces of the radical or revolutionary Left (the organizations on the left of the bureaucratic parliamentary parties of the Left, the Stalinist Communist Party/KKE and the former Euro-communists of Synaspismos/ Coalition), particularly as these forces played a protagonist role in the struggles of the last year.
The discussions to form a common electoral bloc of all the forces of the radical and revolutionary left have already led to a sharp polarization between MERA( the Front of the Radical Left, which includes NAR, the biggest far left organization in Greece, as well as EEK, the Greek Section of the CRFI) and a conglomerate of groups around SEK ( Socialist Workers Party, the Greek clone of its British homonym, a part of the Cliffite International Socialist Tendency) assisted by two semi-Maoist, 'Althusserian', mainly student groups, ARAN and ARAS, joined as well by OKDE/Spartakos, the Greek Section of the USFI.
The dividing line between the two groupings is the program itself.
SEK and Company proposes that "the broad radical movement involved in the struggles last year should unite in a common electoral list, stressing what unites the radical left, avoiding all programmatic issues that can split our ranks, to make our presence strongly felt in the central political scene with a good electoral result, even a possible parliamentary representation". SEK did not hide that from the beginning its project is to promote, through its common electoral intervention on a minimal programmatic basis, the formation in Greece of a broad multi-tendency party of the type represented by Respect in Britain or PSOL in Brazil.
On the opposite side, MERA stresses the importance, particularly in today's conditions of crisis, of an advanced political program of transitional demands to establish the political independence of the working class both from all the bourgeois parties and from the class collaborationist policies of KKE and Synaspismos and to link the immediate needs of the exploited popular masses with the struggle to overthrow capitalism and its governments, to establish workers' power and open the road to socialist-communist emancipation in the country and internationally.
The debate between the two groupings, or rather the conflict between the two incompatible projects, has escalated in June and July in a series of public meetings in Athens and in its working class neighborhoods, in Thessalonica, Patras, Ioannina, Creta etc. MERA is accused to be "ultimatistic" and "sectarian", NAR is blamed to be "a too programmatic purist" and EEK became a particular target of vicious attacks, vilified as an "ultra left, Trotskyite catastrophist sect with Messianic delusions", "main responsible for the programmatic intransigence of MERA".
From the other side, the SEK/ARAN/ARAS/Spartakos initiative is sharply criticized by MERA because of the lack of any revolutionary communist perspective to break with the present capitalist framework, to refuse to pose the question of workers power and a socialist way out from the crisis. To accommodate all the allies, they refuse even to condemn the imperialist "Anan plan" for a protectorate in Cyprus (now to be re-introduced, in relation to the coming elections in Cyprus), because Spartakos, the USFI Section, had supported that plan in 2004. The minimum program( or non program) of that grouping leaves open the doors, according to MERA's criticisms, not only to the "anti-neoliberal front" of Synaspismos, but also with a so-called "united front" with PASOK- in other words, to a Center Left government in Greece.
SEK is particularly targeted because of its policy of collaboration with the mutated neo-liberal bourgeois PASOK, the official opposition Party. The Greek Section of the IST copies faithfully the line of its British counterpart in every detail: while the British SWP used to call to "vote Labour without illusions", the Greek SEK called for decades to "vote PASOK without illusions"( ignoring the different historical origins and structural differences between British social democracy and the initially bourgeois nationalist populism of PASOK); both they had and have all kind of connections with parliamentarians and trade union bureaucrats in Labour and PASOK respectively; when the British SWP formed a "Stop the war coalition" on a bourgeois pacifist basis, the Greek SEK formed a "Coalition" of itself with some bourgeois politicians, mainly of PASOK origins, with the same name, sharing the same bourgeois pacifism and its ardent adaptation to the Muslim bourgeoisie; promoting "unity" on a minimum programmatic base to "include the broadest possible strata" both they are ready for any "popular front" class collaboration in the name of the "united front"; now after the disastrous experience of Respect in Britain, they dream to establish something similar in Greece as well.
The struggle continuous and is equally hot as the summer in this part of the world.
