The capacity of the Left to successfully confront the far right’s continuing political ascent will be severely tested in 2019 in the only country in the world where the decade-long crisis of neoliberal global capitalism swept a radical left party into government: Greece. There was a very rapid passage from euphoria to disappointment on the international left when the Syriza government elected in January 2015 was forced by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to succumb less than six months later to a further austerity bailout package, despite a referendum rejecting a similar creditor proposal by over 60 percent.

Despite this, the Syriza-led government was reelected later in 2015 and now approaches the end of its term. Having just this year finally secured the ending of the long sequence of neoliberal austerity memoranda imposed continuously on Greece since 2010, it now faces, in the run up to the forthcoming election, a main opposition party which has fully embraced the hard turn to the Right elsewhere. Emitting the all too familiar ugly dog whistle of “losing ethnic identity due to migration,” the New Democracy party now amplifies social tensions amid a toxic mixture of neoliberal and reactionary policies and outlandish conspiracy claims — even, most recently, claiming that Syriza’s moves to secularize the Constitution would lead to a ban on Christmas.

The far-right tack New Democracy has taken reflects a situation where, however much public expenditure was hamstrung by the austerity memoranda, Syriza’s attempt to democratize certain aspects of public life in a state with a long reactionary history has been substantial. This has included legislating a path to citizenship for migrants, as well as for their children born in Greece, securing the right of civil union and child fostering for LGBTQ couples, and guaranteeing full access to hospitals for all, including undocumented workers. Moreover, the Syriza-led government reactivated, staffed and overhauled the state agency responsible for scrutinizing labor relations and working conditions which had fallen into a state of vegetation in the pre-Syriza period, during which various illegal employment practices flourished, as well as introduced numerous very innovative systematic policies to relieve the humanitarian crisis caused by the 25 percent drop of the country’s GDP.