Both of the main parties of the Greek radical left, the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) and the Coalition of the Radical Left (SYN) have actively engaged in strengthening their links to civil society over the last decade. Their attempts have been rewarded with considerable electoral gains and affected the structure of Greek party competition, especially after 2007. Nonetheless, the two parties have pursued different ‘back to civil society’ strategies. The KKE has heavily invested in establishing centralized, closely controlled ancillary organizations through which it aims to mobilize civil society from the top down and increase its membership. For its part, SYN has partly taken advantage of already existing institutionalized organizational links to interest groups but has also openly attempted to cultivate new links to social movements and NGOs following a more fragmented yet more co-operative pattern of interaction with civil society. The purpose of this paper will be to explore and compare the strategies of linkage to civil society pursued by the two main parties of the Greek radical left over the last decade. Drawing on Kay Lawson’s work we will focus on participatory and policy-responsive linkage, in particular, parties’ attempts to increase their membership and enhance their ties with civil society organizations. On the one hand we will argue that the two left parties’ clear prioritization of linkage contrasts with the apparent ‘cartelization’ of the Greek party system. On the other hand we will attempt to explain the differences in the two parties’ linkage strategies on the grounds of their programmatic appeal and organizational legacies and argue that their distinct strategies of linkage to civil society have reinforced their programmatic and organizational traits.
