Greece rejects Syriza while welcoming back Varoufakis – and dealing a blow to far-right populism

After all the claims that Europe was drifting towards capture by a team of anti-EU far right politicians, the openly racist Golden Dawn party failed to win a single seat

So Greece has reverted to its tradition of having a family dynasty in charge of the country.

The new prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, leader of the New Democracy party, is the son of a former prime minister and a descendant of the founding father of the post-Ottoman Greek republic, Eleftherios Venizelos. His aunt was Foreign Minister of Greece and his cousin is the New Democracy mayor of Athens.

George Papandreou, son and grandson of a prime minister (an office he also held), has returned to the Greek parliament after winning a seat in this weekend’s election.

Mitsotakis was educated at Harvard and Stanford and swims freely in the elevated waters of Davos globalisation. He brings to the end the Syriza experiment which began in January 2015. Mitsotakis won 39 per cent of the votes against 31 per cent for Syriza.

He is a liberal rightist and became New Democracy leader over the head of party barons who preferred the traditional crony clientelism of Greek politics.

At one level it is a win for centre-right, anti-populist politics. Syriza under its cold, slightly robotic. mono-lingual leader Alexis Tsipras, won power in 2015 after years of flamboyant denunciations of the European Union.

The best known Syriza politician outside Greece was Yanis Varoufakis. He has now burst back into parliament alongside eight other MPs from MeRa25, the Greek offshoot of Varoufakis' Diem25 pan-European movement. It is a curious thing to see him return just as Syriza give way.

Last time we saw him in action on behalf of the country, he came and lectured in a patronising manner social democratic European politicians like the EU finance commissioner, Pierre Moscovici and the Dutch finance minister, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, chair of the Eurogroup.

Varoufakis even tried to browbeat Wolfgang Schäuble, the all-powerful ordoliberal German finance minister into making concessions to Greece that had been refused to Portugal, Ireland or Spain, where governments had cooperated with the EU Commission to overcome the debt crisis after the crash of 2008-2009.

Greek politicians of right and left welcomed the shower of cheap euros that flowed into the country after 2000 and flowed out to German and French banks and infrastructure firms which built new motorways, Athens airport, or the shining Athens Metro.

Contracts were awarded to ministers’ friends and the EU failed disastrously to supervise the Greek economy and steer it away from rampant clientelism and corruption. The Robespierres of Syriza, formed in 2004 from an amalgamation of parties like Renewing Communist Europe, the Internationalist Workers Left, and the Movement for the United in Action Left organised endless protests. They used their network of academics in universities around the world to promote the new party, and eventually won power as Brussels refused to prop up the old New Democracy.

In fact, aggregate opinion polls show that Syrzia lost majority support soon after taking over as government in 2015. The party had few links with other ruling socialist, or social-democratic parties in the rest of Europe. Tsipras had to enter into a coalition with a right-wing nationalist party and appointed as his foreign minister a Stalinist professor who had supported the crushing of the Polish union Solidarity in 1982.

The Syriza government arrived on a populist protest vote and a future as a balanced northern European style centre-left government was beyond its reach. It also indulged in petty prosecutions of previous ministers. None had clean hands but Syriza’s holier-than-thou approach grated especially with its dependence on a nationalist party for its majority.

But as so often, a left-wing party has to clean up the economic mess inherited from its predecessors but gets no reward in the ballot box. The Greek stock market has boomed and Greek debt is cheaper for investors to buy than Italian bonds. But this more benevolent economic climate will now be inherited by Mitsotakis.

The new prime minister, for his part, has opened up New Democracy to liberal reformist politicians like Harry Theoharis, Greece’s former chief tax collector who was hounded out of his job for exposing chronic tax evasion by the middle-classes in Greece’s tax system, and Dimitris Kerides, a professor of international politics and Greek TV commentator.

His economic programme is cautious and Greece still awaits fundamental reform of its economy, labour market, and local government. The question for Syriza and more broadly the Greek left is whether to revert to all-out opposition, street protests and a strategy of tension against the new centre-right government.

But after all the claims since 2016 that Europe was drifting towards capture by a team of anti-EU politicians like Marine Le Pen, Matteo Salvini, or Nigel Farage orchestrated by Steve Bannon, the win for Kyriakos Mitsotakis and New Democracy shows that populism has not won out in the nation that invented democracy. The openly racist Golden Dawn party failed to win a single seat.

Denis MacShane is the former Labour Minister for Europe and author of Brexeternity. The Uncertain Fate of Britain, to be published in September.