By Evi Tsakali,
“But…This is who you are”; maybe one of the most iconic phrases of current Greek pop culture, attributed to the most memeable leader in the Greek political landscape, the Secretary General of the Greek Communist Party (KKE), Dimitris Koutsoumpas. This catchy phrase would only be the first of many more that would soon make him an internet favorite. His way of expressing himself, with his rural accent and his linguistic choices, opting for popular idioms and heavy imagery to convey simple and playfully provocative messages, made him a popular sweetheart… because he is cute. The way he’s wondering “where did you find all these geniuses?” in the Parliament, the way he made a heart with his hands to mock Zoi Konstantopoulou’s communication strategy, or when he spoke in (actually very good) French to support “la lutte ouvrière” during the country-wide strikes against pension reform, showing up with a cake at a random student’s birthday party because his friends invited him as a joke, is cute. Cute is good, cute is innocent, cute cannot hurt you, because cute is not dangerous (especially when you are the leader of a party which pretty much exists just to win a steady 5-7%, a party that will never -and does not intend to- govern, and which rejects everything for the sake of rejection).
Nevertheless, when this cute fatherly figure of the working class shows us not only “who they are” but more who he is, things start getting less cute. During the recent deliberations to abolish the constitutional ban on the opening of private universities in the territory, he stated in the Parliament that if we authorize the opening of private universities in Greece, “female students will go get sugar daddies to finance their studies” (Greek being a heavily gendered language, it’s important for our non-Greek readers to know that he used the word “φοιτήτριες”, which means female students). For obvious reasons, I will leave aside the fact that he probably also wanted to boast to his new, post-internet-virality target group, young people (to whom he wants to project this image of a cool dad) of the fact that he knows the term sugar daddy. I will also leave aside the whole debate of being in favor of or against private universities because I am trying to restrain myself from writing an article about that for months now.
Focusing on that statement per se, according to Koutsoumpas’ point of view, in financial hardship, it is women who will resort to such means (which, via his tone, he qualified as disgraceful by definition); men will probably opt for more “honorable” ways. Koutsoumpas, as well as members of KKE, swiftly issued rectifying statements claiming that he was referring equally to male and female students alike, however, this does not rectify the fact that he used only the word for female students (and if he claims that it came out naturally and without much thought in the moment, then what an interesting Freudian slip…). Besides, despite acknowledging that cases of students seeking sugar daddies/mommies or selling erotic pictures on OnlyFans profiles to finance their studies exist and are abundant in Europe, we have to admit that, for Koutsoumpas to highlight the issue of students struggling to finance their studies, there could have been many other, more communist ways to do so; more communist, and less sexist.
A former minister of the Syriza governments had talked about the “Moral advantage of the Left” (very ironic for the specific politician, but the expression was there to stay). But does that moral advantage consist of being sexist and homophobic for the sake of rejecting evolutions -even progressive ones- that occur in a capitalist system, just because they occur in a capitalist system (which, last time I checked, you are a part of, being an elected party in a Parliament of a liberal democracy)? The Communist Party would give one of the most absurd negative votes when the legislation opening the institution of marriage to gay couples was voted in mid-February. Their rationale? Marriage is a capitalist, middle class residue (totally irrelevant and coincidental comment, Koutsoumpas himself is married, and neither him nor any other member of KKE has urged for an abolition of heterosexual marriages) and recognizing children of same-sex couples that were born via surrogacy abroad would make maternity a marketable product and -eventually- provoke its abolition.
This way, KKE has aligned itself, in this instance, with the negative vote of far-right Elliniki Lysi, ultra-religious Niki, and the bastard offspring of the Golden Dawn, Spartiates. In a country where the governing party has gained considerable margin of maneuver since there is no substantial opposition, a major pillar of the traditional Left aligns itself dangerously with a corpus of parties united under the same political cynicism and disappointment towards the establishment, fostering this antisystemic umbrella regardless of ideology. And when the far-right will rise even more (last June we elected three far-right parties in the Parliament, the ones mentioned above) through a massive protest vote, the Communist Party will only think how, from their point of view, they will have remained consistent until the end, rejecting the establishment by rejecting everything…
I don’t know if there is such a thing as the “Moral advantage of the Left” but I firmly believe that there is (or at least there should be) a moral responsibility of the Left… and there would be nothing cuter.
