Syriza’s stance vis-à-vis the European Union following the financial crisis: the persistence of left Europeanism and the role of the European Left party

The paper argues that Syriza has remained faithful to its distinct form of left Europeanism in the post-crisis era. It aims at testing the relative importance of four factors: the party’s Eurocommunist heritage, its ideological pillars, its internal balance and party factionalism, and its transnational affiliations. In order to assess their importance, the present paper draws from on-going research applying a theoretical framework that combines the work of Johansson and Raunio (2001) with Charalambous’ (2013) communist dilemma. While the former framework provides us with the required areas of investigation, the latter focuses on the party’s mechanisms of altering salience levels in respect to its transnational affiliations. It thus pinpoints an additional level of analysis that highlights the importance of the Party of the European Left for Syriza’s unaltered stance towards the European edifice, at least for the party’s Unitary Platform that witnessed the Left Platform’s withdrawal from Syriza following Syriza’s ‘capitulation’ in July 2015.