The 22nd Congress of the KKE has completed its work. The curtain has fallen, but everyday life and world affairs are the inexorable reality of the next day.
The 22nd Congress of the KKE did not come as a surprise. It confirmed, with the certainty of repetition, a strategy that has been proclaimed for years now without equivocation: no alliance, no compromise, no front with forces within the «system». Dimitris Koutsoumbas spoke of the «genuine, militant, true popular opposition» and described as deeply flawed and disorienting the proposals for progressive or democratic fronts, since, as he argued, they simply lead to the replacement of one administrator by another.
The resolution is clear, almost geometric. On the one hand, the system; NATO, the European Union, governments, oppositions, changes of power. On the other side is the KKE. The others either govern or prepare to govern serving the same strategy. Their differences are secondary. The essence remains unchanged.
But politics is not only a shape, it is also a time. And history rarely moves in absolute straight lines.
EAM was not born out of ideological purity, but out of historical necessity. Under conditions of Occupation, the KKE did not choose a solitary course, but the formation of a broad popular front, which embraced social and political forces far beyond its narrow party boundaries. Was it a manoeuvre? Undoubtedly. But it was also the only response to a starving and resisting society. Without that «impurity», there would have been no mass movement, no popular legitimacy, no history written from below.
1944 was the most tragic proof that correlations do not forgive illusions. The agreements, the compromises, the manoeuvres, from Lebanon to Caserta, were not options for comfort, but moves in an international and domestic context that was suffocatingly unfavourable. One can judge them, reject them, reflect on them. But one cannot erase them from the history of the communist movement, nor can one pretend that there was ever a «pure» moment outside the correlations of power.
The EDA, later on, was not just an electoral scheme. It was the political form of survival of the Left in conditions of persecution, prisons and exile. And if it did not meet the criteria of ideological orthodoxy, it met another crucial result, it gave a voice to hundreds of thousands of people who would otherwise have remained invisible.
The same applies to the post-war period. The democratic cooperation of the early years was not a product of illusion, but a recognition of a social need: to consolidate democracy, to open up political space, to breathe a sigh of relief for a society emerging from dictatorship. Without those consensuses, the left would perhaps have retained greater purity but less influence.
Even in theory, the absolute denial of manoeuvres hardly holds water. Lenin, in «Leftism, the childhood disease of communism», attacks not compromise as such, but the transformation of negation into a principle. Without tactics, strategy becomes faith. And faith, when not tested in reality, risks becoming self-sufficient.
The discussion of fronts is, after all, not a modern misunderstanding, but an old and open question of the revolutionary movement. Lenin saw the alliance not as a strategic ideal, but as a necessary tool in specific circumstances. Compromise, he wrote, is not a betrayal when it is aimed at concentrating forces, but it becomes destructive when it becomes a permanent situation. In the same vein, Gramsci spoke of hegemony not as imposition but as building social alliances within civil society. Without a historical bloc, without linking different social strata in a common project, the left remains a minority, even if it is right. The popular and anti-fascist fronts of the 20th century ,with all their contradictions and failures, were not born from theoretical laxity, but from the awareness that power is not seized only by denunciations, but by correlations. The refusal of all frontal politics, in the name of purity, does not merely negate this tradition; it reverses it, turning tactics into a forbidden word and strategy into a waiting game.
Today, the position that any alternative to the Right and Mitsotakis will be «the same and worse» produces a paradoxical result, disarming society politically in the present. When the Left denies in advance any possibility of a governmental outlet, it does not remain neutral. It postpones the conflict to the indefinite future and lets the present deepen its wounds.
Left unity is not easy, nor is it innocent. It is always temporary, always contradictory. But historically it has been the only way to stop the dominance of the right and give breath to suffocating societies. Not as an end goal, but as a necessary passage.
And here perhaps lies the crucial question, if the Left does not attempt to change the correlations when they crush it, when exactly will it do so?;
History does not expect perfection. It proceeds with cracks, with mistakes, with imperfect choices. Anyone who stands on the sidelines, waiting for the ultimate moment, risks being a spectator of a world that changes without him.
And then, purity looks less like virtue and more like silence.
