Govt mired in extremist positions of tiny internal party minorities

"It's not enough that we have a noose around our neck, we now have to contend with the (extreme) ideologies of the party's rights' advocates. It's unthinkable that we're shooting ourselves in the leg when the lenders are trying to strangle us," was the phrase used by a minister to describe the radical leftist government's handling of domestic policy, "handling" that has begun to eat away at the government's support amongst the public opinion.

The report, by Stavros Lygeros, was top-selling Sunday paper Proto Thema's lead front-page article over the weekend.

In reality, the article continues, the "clash" within the ruling party is between the small and often extreme minority views expressed by the "inner party" cadres and the majority of voters who gave the party and its leader Alexis Tsipras a plurality of the vote (nearly 37 percent) in the Jan. 25 election.
This contradiction comes amid the "special circumstances" of the current economic crisis and the fact that many centre-left and centre-right voters opted for SYRIZA with the sole criterion to end austerity policies.

This contradiction was seen in the composition of the Cabinet, which to a large degree reflects the "small SYRIZA" of 4 percent - of previous elections - and not the 36.4 percent it picked up last January. This observation has more to do with policies, rather than individuals.
The beginning came with a "low-level" issue that, however, affected several thousand families and set the tone for an "ideological" re-direction.

New Education Minister Aristeidis Baltas first provoked public opinion when he disputed the need for excellence in the secondary education system, and at the same time essentially announced the abolition of state magnet schools. A cascade...