Angeliki Trikoili
Philologist
Coordinator, Kalymnos Local Organization
I’ll put it simply—because sometimes the complex is actually very simple.
➡️The fact that politics has come to be synonymous with corruption is, unfortunately, nothing new. It is certainly not hopeful or optimistic—but above all, it is neither a natural outcome nor an unavoidable fate.
Besides not being a universal phenomenon (no, not “everyone stole it,” etc.), neither in politics nor in society at large are “they all the same.”
This flattening narrative leads to the devaluation of institutions, abstention, resignation, and—consequently—the passive acceptance of a “right-wing stability,” quite coincidentally.
➡️The Trap of De-ideologization
The System: To this day, no political system other than parliamentary democracy has been devised—at least to my knowledge—through which a country can be governed democratically, representatively, and approximately fairly.
“Demolition”: Which means that revolutionary outbursts like “the System must be torn down and rebuilt from scratch,” especially when voiced by people “outside politics,” are not only naïve statements and empty fireworks, but more than that—dangerous oversimplifications.
And in a strange way, they often end up on the far-right ideological flank, while invoking the absence of ideology.
Who, and how, will carry out this “demolition”? In what historical vacuum? By what means, with which tools, and under what institutional safeguards and guarantees will we arrive at “reconstruction”?
➡️The Messiahs: Saviors, sages, peddlers, and magicians who claim to possess mysterious recipes for direct democracy, de-ideologization, purification, and demolition clearly target social despair, the sense of deadlock, and low expectations. They invest in the simplified logic of “what we need is a dictatorship,” cultivating artificial ideological fog in order to draw a willing audience from everywhere.
➡️There Is Another Way: Putting People at the Center
Society needed to be convinced yesterday that there are solutions far from authoritarianism, harsh neoliberalism, and the logic of the “survival of the fittest.”
There are political solutions—within the political system—that can and do have the will to improve it and to free it from the deliberate discredit to which some have condemned it, by no accident and with full intent.
Solutions with a clear progressive ideological sign, leading society away from the so-called stability that corrodes it to the core, and from the barbarity that triggers reflexes of social automation.
Political solutions that place human rights above blind repression; that favor creative, productive dialogue over top-down imposition; that serve—and place at the center—people and the improvement of their lives, rather than promoting exclusively economic or political interests, domestic or otherwise.
➡️The Need for a Progressive Counteroffensive
What we need, therefore, is the unity of healthy left-wing forces. We need all those “SYN-” (together-) elements that define and shape the Left’s ideological orientation and our common action: Unity of purpose, joint action, cooperation, consensus.
It is the only path to overturn, as soon as possible, the bleak reality that corrodes and destroys the DNA of Greek society—a society being led with mathematical certainty to the impoverishment of the primary sector, the decimation of agricultural production, the depopulation of the periphery, and the mortgaging of all our futures.
That’s all—and strength to us all.
