Despite the tense atmosphere at the party headquarters, the chances that the Central Committee will be called upon today to vote yes or no on the dissolution of SYRIZA are slim to none.
Famellos’s camp does not want to hammer the final nail in the party’s coffin on camera (“no to self-dissolution”), but will prefer—according to reports—to let it slide over the coming months until the party’s effective demise is cemented.
This is because most party officials and… far more voters have already shifted their allegiance to Alexis Tsipras’s ELAS, while resignations by members from local organizations are a daily occurrence.
On the other hand, the faction led by Pavlos Polakis, Rena Dourou, and Nikos Pappas does not appear ready for the “final solution,” as, numerically at least, they remain a minority within the leadership body.
Ms. Dourou’s proposal to the Political Secretariat yesterday is indicative: to form a committee tasked with exhausting all efforts at cooperation by engaging in dialogue with the leaders of other parties, namely Alexis Tsipras and Nikos Androulakis.
The fact that Mr. Polakis participated as usual in yesterday’s meeting of the Political Secretariat (and will participate in today’s Central Committee meeting) is interpreted as a temporary, if only “victory” for him, given that Socrates Famellos had been insisting until Tuesday that the MP had not raised the issue with the party bodies after he was expelled from the parliamentary group.
It is noteworthy, however, that no member of the Executive Committee raised the issue of Mr. Polakis’s presence at these critical meetings.
Mr. Famellos’s proposal that SYRIZA not run in the elections in opposition to Mr. Tsipras’s ELAS was comfortably approved and supported by officials such as Olga Gerovasili, Kostas Zachariadis, Mariliza Xenogiannakopoulou, and Rania Svigkou.
What Mr. Famellos did not clarify (and is expected to do so today if pressed…) is how certain party officials will be elected as MPs under ELAS, while, formally, they will belong to SYRIZA.
Since such a scenario would constitute… a global first, logic—as well as the information available—points to a single outcome: the effective dissolution of SYRIZA as the elections approach, “without decisions, votes, or drama.”
By then, it will become clear how many—and, more importantly, which—of SYRIZA’s current leaders Mr. Tsipras will want to include on the ELAS candidate lists.
“By September, it will be too late”…
It is precisely this development that the Polakis-Dourou-Pappas faction is trying to halt, as they realize that if July arrives without clear solutions, the battle to preserve SYRIZA as a party capable of reaching the national polls will be lost for good.
This group believes that the party can “run” in the elections either independently or through a coalition that they will seek to form in the coming months, with initiatives and figures such as Nikos Kotzias, Louka Katseli, and other figures in the political arena.
In fact, they believe that the 1.5–2% that polls give SYRIZA following the founding of ELAS “serves as a catalyst” for the electoral battle. They even believe that left-wing voters who did not “applaud” the founding of the new party by Mr. Tsipras will support SYRIZA “for the sake of it,” as a leading figure on this side characteristically puts it.
If avoiding a final split is prioritized today, it will be very unlikely that there will be mass resignations of Central Committee members who are… with one foot in the Hellenic Police, because, in that case, “we will leave the party to Polakis,” as officials from the majority say, respectively.
With this in mind, mass defections by MPs (note: more than ten are ready to do so) will not be easy either, since such a move would remove them from the Central Committee.
Given that today’s Central Committee meeting concerns not a tactical decision but the very existence of the party, all sides were deliberating late into the night regarding their stance for today.