European Politics Thread

The incident showed the disillusionment Syriza's twenty-somethings feel with leader Alexis Tsipras, the former Communist student activist they once celebrated as one of their own. In just seven months as premier, Tsipras, under pressure from Greece's creditors, has backtracked on his pre-election promises to end austerity.

"Syriza's youth is almost over, very few people are staying behind," said one of those who walked out.

Tsipras has called an election on Sept. 20 in an effort to win a fresh mandate to push through the economic reforms that are a condition of Greece's latest 86 billion euro bailout. But Syriza's lead over its rivals has crumbled, with one poll this week showing the conservative New Democracy party in front.

Support from those aged 18-44 - once the backbone of Syriza's support according to pollsters - has plummeted. The most popular party for 18-24-year-olds now is the far right Golden Dawn, while Syriza languishes in fourth place, data by the pollster Alco show.

A fractured election result could spell more turmoil for a country battered by recession and high unemployment, and risks derailing the implementation of the bailout program that is up for review by the creditors in October.

"These elections started as something 'easy' for Tsipras and have evolved into something extremely complicated," said Thomas Gerakis, the head of pollster Marc. "The key issue in this race is what the former Syriza voters will do. Will Syriza manage to rally its former voters?"

It is a remarkable turnaround for a party that stormed to power in January promising voters more jobs and an end to years of wage and pension cuts.

During that election, Syriza's young supporters played an outsize role on the frontline of the campaign, be it handing out leaflets, holding rallies or organizing festivals.

At forty years of age, Tsipras became the country's youngest ever prime minister, and to many seemed a breath of fresh air compared to the dynasties that have dominated Greek politics for years. His government's former spokesman is 35 years old.

But after months of bad-tempered negotiations with the country's lenders, and with banks shut and the economy on the brink of collapse, Tsipras capitulated to the creditors' demands to raise taxes and slash spending to tackle Greece's debt.

Even though the standoff with the creditors worsened the country's economic pain, opinion polls initially suggested that Tsipras remained Greece's most popular leader, because he had at least put up a decent fight. His decision to call a referendum on the bailout incensed the creditors but played well at home.

But now many are furious and may switch their allegiance to smaller parties or boycott the vote. Young Greeks have been hit especially hard by the debt crisis, with more than half of those aged 15-24 out of work, the highest proportion in Europe. Many live at home, supported by their parents and grandparents, or emigrate.

"He didn't try hard enough," said Yannis Aggelidis, a 22-year-old university student who voted for Tsipras in January but may abstain or vote for a small anti-capitalist party next time. "He had a chance and he lost it. If he had fulfilled only part of what Syriza had promised he would have stayed in power for a very long time."

Divisions in Syriza's youth wing began to emerge after Greek voters delivered a resounding 'no' to the bailout terms in July, then saw their government capitulate to Greece's creditors on point after point in the weeks that followed.

For many of Syriza's youth council members, the final straw was an interview Tsipras gave in August to Alpha TV, in which he wrote off the prospects of today's young people but hoped his own younger children could prosper.

"Sadly, we lost this generation due to the bailouts. The generation of people in their twenties today, young people, young scientists go abroad, unfortunately," Tsipras said.

To be sure, there is still time for Syriza to claw back support. Pollsters say that about half of the undecided voters, especially women, are former Syriza backers.

"The people who were Syriza's core voters are scattered, and are deeply concerned," Dimitris Mavros from pollster MRB said.

But rival parties, including New Democracy and PASOK, which was in power in the early years of the crisis, are stepping up their efforts to win young voters. For example, PASOK has appointed 33-year-old Pavlos Christidis as its new spokesman.

For undecided voters like Nefeli Tsikrika, a 24-year-old law student and former Syriza supporter, it's hard to know which party to turn to.

"We are disappointed. It's not what we expected," she said. "I was a supporter, but I'm not proud of it."

"Then again you reach a deadlock, you don't know what to vote for. Is any government in Greece actually free to govern or is it bound to the demands of foreign powers?"

Few Eurocrats’ eyebrows remained unraised when Mr Tusk won his appointment. Poland, the country he had run for seven years, had barely a decade’s experience of EU membership and remained outside the euro, the union’s signature project. Mr Tusk’s abrasive style, honed in the rough-and-tumble of Poland’s young democratic politics, seemed an ill fit with the consensual methods preferred in Brussels. He worked to improve his English but, some sniff, still cannot speak French.

Mr Tusk has not swayed all his critics, though their numbers are dwindling. Europe’s crisis-manager-in-chief has weightier problems on his mind. He returns repeatedly to a single theme: the need to shore up Europe’s liberal values against the threat from populism. This is hardly an original thought in a continent afflicted by Marine Le Pen and Viktor Orban, but Mr Tusk has his own take on it. The liberal centre must be “tough and determined”, he said recently in the Netherlands, “not to become more like the right-wing populists, but to protect Europe against them.”

Thus, for example, his mantra that the EU must regain control of the borders through which hundreds of thousands of refugees and other migrants have flowed this year. He has called for an end to the policy of “open doors and windows”, a remark some saw as a jab at Angela Merkel, the German chancellor. If voters cannot be assured that Europe’s frontiers are secure, fears Mr Tusk, then they will turn to nastier leaders. (He mentions Poland, where nationalists have just ejected Civic Platform, the centre-right party Mr Tusk founded and led to two election victories.) That will make it hard, if not impossible, to pursue the more liberal policies, such as sharing out asylum-seekers across Europe, that Mr Tusk says he backs. He notes the paradox: to preserve its openness, Europe must countenance a degree of closure.

Mr Tusk is no gentler when he discusses Britain’s position in the EU. In early November David Cameron, the prime minister, will send Mr Tusk a letter outlining his requests for a “renegotiation” of Britain’s membership. It will fall to Mr Tusk to seek the common ground between what Mr Cameron needs and what his 27 counterparts can accept, particularly on Britain’s demands to reduce welfare payments to EU immigrants (Mr Cameron’s foot-dragging could postpone serious talks until next spring, possibly pushing Britain’s promised in/out referendum into 2017). Mr Tusk says that his role is clear: to help Mr Cameron keep Britain in the EU. But he worries that the process could encourage other countries to demand their own opt-outs and exemptions. For Britain to be a “role model” for everyone, he warns, would mean “the end of the EU”.

Beyond the EU’s borders, the limits of his power are becoming clearer. With fighting raging in Ukraine, Mr Tusk took office vowing a tough line on Russia. His opinions have not changed, but he now accepts that the EU can do little for Crimea or the Donbas. While Germany and France have taken the political lead in talking to Russia about Ukraine, the challenge for the EU, says Mr Tusk, is internal: to defy Vladimir Putin’s attempts to foster division in Europe. So far the EU has held the line on sanctions (which require unanimous backing, and must soon be renewed). Passing this test, which Mr Tusk describes as Europe’s first big challenge since 1989, bodes well for future crises, he says.

Perhaps the new job has mellowed the president: his happiness now rests on that of the leaders whose meetings he oversees. At a euro-zone summit Mr Tusk chaired in July, for example, it took 17 hours to find a deal that kept Greece inside the currency. This is a drastic change from his time in Poland, when, he acknowledges, he had “very limited” tolerance for political wrangling. Still, unlike the many Eurocrats who seem to have spent their whole lives in the EU’s unlovely bureaucratic buildings, Mr Tusk retains a whiff of the outsider. His approach has not been to everyone’s taste: he has pricked the egos of ambassadors, for example, by declining to meet them as often as his predecessor did. But most admit that he is warming to his role.

Avoiding “no more Europe”

Mr Tusk describes himself as an “obsessive pro-European” rather than a federalist. That distinction might once have been difficult to parse. Not today: the EU’s problems, from the integrity of its single currency to the security of its borders, cut to the heart of national sovereignty—but they also lead irresistibly to the logic of co-operation, if not its practice.

The creation of Mr Tusk’s job in the prelapsarian Lisbon treaty of 2007 was for some the first step towards a “president of Europe”. That the task should now fall to one who accepts the primacy of national governments is no surprise. Mr Tusk, never having succumbed to the dream of a federal Europe, does not regret its demise. He accepts German leadership, with the caveat that “not everything that is good for Germany is good for Europe.” Instead, he has set himself a humbler task: to ensure that Europe’s stream of crises does not entirely wash away the old order.

Unlike the sermonisers of yore, who preached More Europe and predicted the end times for nation-states, Mr Tusk is more like a life coach, gently urging Europe’s anxious leaders to find the courage to face up to hard but unavoidable challenges. Others may build Europe; he will try to keep it from falling apart.