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This paper evaluates the impact of the European Structural Funds on the performance of employment policy in Greece. The employment policy in Greece, is a policy funded by EU and characterized by centralization, increased red tape, administrative overlaps and fragmentation pitfalls, factors' contributing to policy's ineffectiveness. Based on the comparative analysis of the implementation and performance of ESIF Operational Programs in Greece and by focusing on the case of the Greek Public Employment Service (OAED), this article evaluates European Union Policies actual impact on employment policy effectiveness and new jobs creation in Greece during the 2012–2020 period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper argues that Syriza has remained faithful to its distinct form of left Europeanism in the post-crisis era. It aims at testing the relative importance of four factors: the party’s Eurocommunist heritage, its ideological pillars, its internal balance and party factionalism, and its transnational affiliations. In order to assess their importance, the present paper draws from on-going research applying a theoretical framework that combines the work of Johansson and Raunio (2001) with Charalambous’ (2013) communist dilemma. While the former framework provides us with the required areas of investigation, the latter focuses on the party’s mechanisms of altering salience levels in respect to its transnational affiliations. It thus pinpoints an additional level of analysis that highlights the importance of the Party of the European Left for Syriza’s unaltered stance towards the European edifice, at least for the party’s Unitary Platform that witnessed the Left Platform’s withdrawal from Syriza following Syriza’s ‘capitulation’ in July 2015. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It is often assumed that the rise of populism leads to political outcomes that threaten to undermine stable democratic politics and commitment to European integration. This article interrogates the relationship between increasing political polarisation including violent protests and the institutional trajectories followed by mainstream political parties. Through an analysis conceptually anchored on historical and sociological institutionalist approaches to change and resilience, the article examines the hypothesis that change in party structures can be accelerated by a hostile social and economic environment. Empirical evidence provided from the case study of Greece delineates how this change has occurred through the gradual development of discourse coalitions. Key findings include the introduction of novel structures and practices in party contestation and campaigning that differ from the existing national (domestic) model and can in part be attributed to EU impact. However, as innovations remain limited in scope and appeal in the short-term, they prove unable to constrain the populist surge and the associated counter-innovations or prevent the return to discarded national models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]