Institutionalism as a Substitute for Politics: SYRIZA and the Drift Away from the Gravity of the Times

In periods of historical turning points, politics is not judged by its compliance with institutions, but by its capacity to confront them. And yet SYRIZA’s contemporary strategy seems to have invested almost exclusively in a rhetoric and practice of “institutionalism,” which not only fails to respond to the depth of the social crisis, but functions as a substitute for political seriousness. The invocation of institutions, normality, and constraints is presented as responsibility, while in reality it amounts to political weakness.

Robert Grafstein, in his classic article The Problem of Institutional Constraint, highlights a crucial point that is often left unspoken: institutions are not merely constraints that bind the action of political agents, but outcomes of specific historical balances of power. Constraints are neither external nor neutral; they are embedded in relations of power and reproduce particular interests. When politics accepts institutions as a non-negotiable framework, it renounces in advance the possibility of transforming them.

This is precisely where the problem of SYRIZA’s current institutional self-presentation lies. Instead of treating institutions as a terrain of conflict, it treats them as a guarantee of seriousness. Instead of foregrounding the class character of the state, the judiciary, or European mechanisms, it appeals to them as neutral arbiters that simply require “better management.” This stance does not overcome the defeat of 2019; it is its theoretical consolidation.

Institutionalism, as it is deployed in the party’s political discourse, operates in a depoliticizing way. It turns conflict into procedure, social outrage into a request for consultation, and the crisis of representation into a problem of communication. Yet, as Grafstein implicitly reminds us, when institutions are presented as stable and inescapable constraints, political action is confined to options within a framework already set by others.

In an era of social disintegration, extreme inequalities, an authoritarian turn of the state, and the delegitimation of representative mechanisms, an insistence on institutional normality is not a sign of maturity but a denial of reality. The gravity of the times demands a politics that recognizes institutions did not “break down,” but function exactly as they were designed to: as mechanisms for stabilizing a social order collapsing to the benefit of the few.

SYRIZA’s institutional rhetoric thus becomes disconnected from the real subjects of the crisis. It does not address workers, the precarious, the excluded, but an abstract “rational citizen” who supposedly seeks nothing more than better institutional performance. But politics, like institutions, is not neutral. And when a party of the Left refuses to position itself against institutions as relations of power, it ceases to operate as a force of transformation and becomes a manager of constraints.

The problem, then, is not that SYRIZA is not institutional enough. It is that it is institutional in the wrong way and at the wrong moment. In a historical conjuncture that demands ruptures, it chooses adjustments. In a period when society questions the legitimacy of institutions, the party invests in their restoration without contesting their content. In this way, institutionalism ceases to be a tool and becomes an ideology.

If the Left wants to return as a serious political actor, it must remember what theory—from Marx to Grafstein—constantly underscores: institutions do not merely constrain politics; they are the field where politics either confronts power or surrenders to it. And today, surrender is dangerously baptized “responsibility.”

Institutionalism as a Substitute for Politics: SYRIZA and the Drift Away from the Gravity of the Times

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