Chapter 19 The Rise of SYRIZA in Greece 2009–2015: The Digital Battlefield Nikos Smyrnaios and Athina Karatzogianni Introduction The Rise of Syriza from 2009 to 2015 when the party took power in Greece, governing the country till 2019, and its fall, when it lost to New Democracy, has been unquestionably a major political event. Given the context of European politics, the importance of the vote in a small peripheral country of the EU was surpassed by far by its domestic issues. Indeed, SYRIZA’s anti-austerity agenda challenged dominant EU policies and echoed demands for social justice and democracy during that turbulent period, expressed by movements around the world, such as the Indignados, Occupy or the Arab spring (Karatzogianni, 2015), in a Europe riddled by socio-economic and political crisis (Spourdalakis, 2014). Multiple structural factors explain the rise of SYRIZA (Katsourides, 2016): Greece’s particular political history, dramatic socio-economic crisis and extreme austerity, the nepotism and corruption of the two dominant political parties (PASOK and New Democracy), distrust of the mainstream media, but also another element in these structural conditions influenced SYRIZA’s rise to power: The overwhelming mobilisation online in its favour. In this context, SYRIZA evolved from a minor coalition of the left with roots in the Euro-communist tradition, as well as the alter-globalisation movement, to the main unitary single- party of the Greek Left, and it developed a successful populist strategy during the crisis in order to gain access to power (Agnantopoulos & Lambiri, 2015; Karaliotas, 2019; Stavrakakis & Katsambekis, 2014). An interesting characteristic of SYRIZA’s accession to government is that it built on international support mainly through social networking sites, particularly Twitter, against domestic and European mainstream media that were extremely critical of its propositions. International support for the Greek radical Left intensified with the anti-austerity movement of 2011–2013 through to the 2014 European elections, in which the leader of SYRIZA, Alexis Tsipras, was the candidate of the European Left for the presidency of the European Commission against establishment politicians, such as Martin Schulz and Jean-Claude Juncker. The crisis as well as the particular institutional and political context of The Emerald Handbook of Digital Media in Greece, 289–312 Copyright © 2020 Emerald Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved doi:10.1108/978-1-83982-400-520201055