“Reception for the Restoration of Democracy: The Loud Political Absences from the Presidential Palace
Among those attending the annual reception at the Presidential Palace will be Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, PASOK leader Nikos Androulakis, Communist Party (KKE) Secretary-General Dimitris Koutsoumbas, and Speaker of Parliament Nikitas Kaklamanis.
Absent from the event will be Greek Solution leader Kyriakos Velopoulos, NIKI leader Dimitris Natsios, Course of Freedom leader Zoe Konstantopoulou, while SYRIZA president Rena Dourou has also announced that she will not attend. The leaders of extra-parliamentary parties—including Maria Karystianou, Yanis Varoufakis and Stefanos Kasselakis—will likewise stay away.
Former Prime Minister Antonis Samaras is expected to decide at the very last moment whether to attend. According to reports, former Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras will also be absent” .
Nowhere else in Europe does one still encounter such a political specimen: a Stalinist party marching beneath the hammer and sickle while recycling the wooden clichés of Soviet orthodoxy, baptizing them—as though in some political Pool of Siloam—as “communist” or “left-wing.”
In today’s Europe such a party would be little more than a historical curiosity were it not for the fact that it shamelessly exploits the memory of fallen heroes while violating the very ideals of those who genuinely fought as communists to change the world. Men and women who ultimately offered their own lives in pursuit of that cause.
Stalin was, beyond serious dispute, the gravedigger of communism.
The moment this narcissistic and paranoid ruler adopted as official state doctrine the very methods by which capitalist power had traditionally maintained itself—and often surpassed them in brutality—communism began its moral collapse.
The justifications he invoked, and which his admirers still repeat today—“the end justifies the means” or “fight your enemy with his own weapons”—were precisely the poisons that hollowed out communist ideology from within. Over time they transformed it into little more than the ruthless machinery of an authoritarian state centered upon an infallible father figure.
Certainly, the Greek communist resistance fighters did not sacrifice themselves for such a state.
Nor would most of those who died have embraced Stalin’s criminal methods as necessary instruments for building a new social order.
No genuine transformation—and no new world worthy of the name—can ever be founded upon the blood of innocents, fabricated military tribunals, or the deliberate starvation of millions of the world’s wretched.
Even Nazism observed one principle that Stalinism repeatedly violated.
It did not casually cast its own followers into the flames. It did not systematically torture loyal members merely to extract fabricated confessions from those accused—often falsely—or guilty only of ideological deviation.
Yet these became defining characteristics of Stalinism throughout the decades in which it exercised one of history’s most terrifying systems of state terror: executions of innocents, arbitrary arrests, torture, humiliation and the destruction of its own comrades.
These were people who had struggled to create a new society but never imagined that the regime born of their revolution could eventually become every bit as oppressive—and in many respects even worse—than the Tsarist order they had overthrown.
Today’s Communist Party of Greece has, for decades, refused to renounce even the smallest fragment of this Stalinist gospel.
The issue is not merely the grotesque symbols it still proudly displays as a parliamentary party—symbols that ought to inspire shame and remorse in any authentic communist rather than admiration or declarations of loyalty toward one of history’s most murderous regimes.
That regime betrayed the hopes and ideals of generations of sincere leftists.
It is remarkable that ever since Konstantinos Karamanlis legalized the Communist Party following the restoration of democracy—a step encouraged by Greece’s European orientation—the party leadership at Perissos has consistently functioned as a convenient auxiliary of the conservative Right.
Even the party’s historic secretary, Charilaos Florakis, entered into political cooperation during the turbulent events of 1989 with Constantine Mitsotakis—the politician widely associated by his critics with the political defections known in Greece as the “Apostasy.” The objective was obvious: to weaken Andreas Papandreou’s PASOK, which at the time embodied much of the broader Left’s popular aspirations.
Within both the trade-union movement and everyday parliamentary politics, the Stalinist party has repeatedly preferred cooperation with conservative forces over alliances with other anti-right parties.
This has remained one of its defining political habits from the post-junta era until today.
The arrangement has become one of the longest-running performances in Greece’s parliamentary theatre: the role of the “useful idiot.”
The Stalinist party performs the role of the uncompromising enemy of the Right, while the Right, in turn, proudly points to its parliamentary presence as proof of Greece’s democratic credentials. After all, it can always claim that even its fiercest ideological opponent speaks freely in Parliament and participates fully in democratic life.
It is an exchange of roles that would be laughable were it not so cynical.
Only the most devoted Stalinist partisan seems incapable of recognizing the performance.
Tonight, the Stalinists and Mitsotakis’s conservative establishment will probably be the only political camps genuinely comfortable celebrating Greece’s Democracy Day.
The former will attend as accepted members of the democratic family—albeit in the role of the obedient servant familiar from old Greek cinema, invited to the mansion of the wealthy master.
There will stand Dimitris Koutsoumbas, impeccably dressed in his suit, with the hammer-and-sickle badge discreetly pinned beneath his lapel.
For the Greece of the Left.
Or so we are expected to believe.