Angry at what they see as a betrayal of Syriza’s anti-austerity principles, the 25 MPs announced their intention to form a new party in a letter to parliament the day after Tsipras resigned to pave the way for snap elections next month.
Led by the former energy minister, Panagiotis Lafazanis, the new
movement will be the third-largest group in the Greek parliament and could conceivably receive a mandate to try to form a new government.
Tsipras announced his resignation in a televised address on Thursday night. He said he felt a moral obligation to put Greece’s third international bailout deal, and the further swingeing austerity measures it requires, to the people.
Last week he piloted the punishing deal through the Greek parliament, but suffered a major rebellion when nearly one-third of Syriza MPs either voted against the package or abstained. Tsipras is gambling that he will be able to silence the rebels and shore up public support for the three-year bailout programme.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, the Syriza labour minister, George Katrougalos, said the government needed to “reconfirm its mandate” to implement the third Greek bailout and that the party is “crippled by a number of dissident MPs”.
“This is the essence of democracy, we do not have any problem to ask the people. We do not want to govern against the popular will,” he said, adding that Tspiras and his government were “confident in rightness of our policies and the maturity of the Greek electorate”.
Last week Tsipras successfully piloted the punishing three-year, €86bn package through the Greek parliament but only thanks to opposition backing: nearly one-third of his ruling Syriza party’s 149 MPs either voted against the package or abstained.
Katrougalos said the government had managed “the best possible deal” when faced with “economic blackmail”. He added that democracy had functioned in Greece, but had failed at the EU level.
The package entails a radical overhaul of the Greek economy and major reforms of health, welfare, pensions and taxation. Tsipras will be counting on securing re-election before its harshest effects – which include further pension cuts, VAT increases and a controversial “solidarity” tax on incomes – make themselves felt.
Asked whether there was a risk in a growth of support for rightwing parties in Greece, Katrougalos said there was no longer a “typical confrontation between left and right”, saying there was a clear difference between Syriza and “the political parties that support oligarchies”.
The party’s success in the forthcoming election was not just a battleground for the country, but a test of whether Europe could “neutralise neo-liberal policies and counter balance recession measures with growth”, he said.
“Greece is going to be become the mirror of the future of Europe, depending on how we implement this difficult arrangement,” he said. “It was never just a Greek issue, it is a more broad confrontation between two visions of Europe, a social one and a neo-liberal one.”
On Thursday night the Greek president, Prokopis Pavlopoulos, began the process of asking the main opposition party leaders whether they would be able to form a new government following Tsipras’ resignation.
The current makeup of the 300-member parliament makes that improbable, with neither the centre-right New Democracy party, the new Syriza rebel group Popular Unity, the far-right Golden Dawn or the centrist To Potami thought likely to have enough allies to govern.
If no party can form a coalition government, parliament will be dissolved and fresh elections must then be held within a month. Government officials told Greek media on Thursday that the most likely date for the poll was 20 September.
Once parliament is dissolved, the prime minister will be replaced for the duration of the short campaign by the president of Greece’s supreme court, Vassiliki Thanou-Christophilou, a vocal bailout opponent, as head of a caretaker government.
Tsipras, who swept to power elections seven months ago on a promise to end austerity, remains popular with many Greek voters for having at least tried to stand up to Greece’s creditors. He is widely tipped to win the poll, the country’s fifth in six years.
He insisted in his Thursday address that accepting creditor demands for further tough reforms was the only way to ensure Greece remained in the eurozone, which is what opinion polls show the overwhelming majority of the Greek population want.
Tsipras said he was proud of his time in office and had got “a good deal for the country” after seven months of bruising negotiations with its international lenders, despite bringing it “close to the edge”.
He added: ”I wish to be fully frank with you. We did not achieve the agreement that we were hoping for. But [the agreement] was the best anyone could have achieved. We are obliged to observe it, but at the same time we will do our utmost to minimise its negative consequences.”
Greece’s European creditors did not appear to be dismayed by Tsipras’ widely expected move to call an early election.
Asked whether the election would change the numbers of the bailout deal, Thomas Wieser, the head of the Euro Working Group that prepares decisions for meetings of eurozone finance ministers, told Austrian broadcaster ORF: “No … This was really an expected step and for many people a desired step to get to a clearer structure in the Greek government … In October we have a meeting about a possible debt relief and (after the election) we hope for further progress of the programme.”
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