The new year brings a climate of tension and hard confrontations to PASOK ahead of the Conference in March, while in the background remains the “stuck needle” and the risk of losing second place in the polls and later in the elections. Harilaou Trikoupi will then be called upon once again to compete for the leadership of the center-left, should new parties under Alexis Tsipras and Maria Karystianou enter the electoral battle dynamically.

From the first days of 2026, as all indications suggest, the different “lines” within PASOK regarding the party’s course in both the pre-election and post-election periods will begin to clash. Party officials and MPs are lining up for battle, preparing their “offensive” to prevail with their views. The dilemmas they are called upon to answer are many and complex, and far removed from the “short-sighted” perception that sees the Congress merely as a battleground of party machines. The major issue for all officials, regardless of whom they supported in the leadership election, is how—even at the eleventh hour—they can define developments from a position of strength in the shifting sands of the center-left and thus refute any scenario linked to a spectacular recapture of the space by the Tsipras party. Discussion about the creation of a party by Maria Karystianou as well adds further difficulty to the equation; however, at this stage it is the “reshuffling of the deck” by the former prime minister and SYRIZA leader that forces PASOK to act immediately and “preemptively” to stem any potential leakage toward “Ithaca.”

At Harilaou Trikoupi, for the time being, activities are being organized around the leadership with the participation of close associates of Nikos Androulakis, while the Congress Political Secretariat—formed to facilitate exchanges of views among top officials on the recurring “dilemmas”—has not met since early November. Even at the “snapshot” with the Christmas carols at Harilaou Trikoupi, only Nikos Androulakis and some of his close associates were present, as members of the Political Secretariat had not been invited. Haris Doukas, Pavlos Geroulanos, Anna Diamantopoulou, and other front-line figures—such as Manolis Christodoulakis—continue, however, to make “forays” in the Athens basin and the regions, seizing every opportunity to broaden the “pool” of their intra-party supporters ahead of the Congress. Leading figures who are not MPs, such as Haris Doukas and Anna Diamantopoulou, are by necessity focused on strengthening their position on the intra-party chessboard, which would allow them to be elected “high up” to the new Central Committee.

Haris Doukas sparked a debate that caught Harilaou Trikoupi off guard by proposing primary elections for selecting the party’s parliamentary candidates, as presidential-aligned officials such as Vangelis Tsogas rushed to argue that such a process is practiced nowhere. Mr. Doukas, however, returned to the issue, reminding that there is a clear provision in the party statute, adopted at the 2022 Congress during Nikos Androulakis’s presidency. “We want an open, participatory party. The selection of PASOK’s parliamentary candidates must be a substantive, democratic process, with open ballots and direct participation of the Movement’s members and friends. For those who pretend not to understand, I repeat my two proposals,” Mr. Doukas emphasized, proposing in a post: “Immediate establishment of the Ballot Committee for the evaluation and selection of candidates based on Article 33, paragraph 6 of the Statute, and primary elections, as also provided for in Article 15, paragraph 1 of the Statute, with current MPs automatically being candidates.”

At the same time, the Mayor of Athens is intensifying teleconferences with officials who supported him in last year’s internal contest and appears to enjoy broad acceptance among “green” local government officials who, at the KEDE Congress, managed to “threaten” the numerical superiority of their “blue” counterparts. He is moving energetically, claiming a central role in the rapidly evolving center-left landscape, with the view that PASOK’s autonomous path to the elections should not be equated with political “isolation.” He says “yes” to dialogue with progressive forces—therefore also with the Tsipras party—and proposes that the Congress decide on a clear “no” to post-election cooperation with New Democracy. His proposal does not appear likely to be put to a vote at the Congress, even though Pavlos Geroulanos also favors dialogue with other forces, but not with New Democracy. In any case, Mr. Doukas’s “bet” is to leave a distinct imprint at the Congress and to keep his party circle strengthened, especially after Manolis Christodoulakis (one of his main supporters in 2024) decided to organize his own network of party allies more methodically across Greece. Christodoulakis, as party Secretary under Fofi Gennimata, had already set a course in this direction, securing a prominent position at the previous Congress as well, where the comfortable dominance of the Androulakis machine was confirmed. Doukas, Geroulanos, and Christodoulakis also maintain dialogue and often exchange views with George Papandreou, who will be one of the main speakers at the Congress.

There, despite PASOK’s low poll numbers and Nikos Androulakis’s limited popularity among party leaders, it is considered almost certain that the Harilaou Trikoupi team will once again try to “control” large percentages of Congress delegates. An experienced official adds that “beyond ‘controlling’ the Congress, Androulakis will seek to form candidate lists with the prospect of electing as many ‘presidential’ candidates as possible in each constituency, with an eye on the post-election landscape.” The same official notes that “if at the Congress we shift our focus from the ‘big picture’ to what essentially feeds the ‘machines’ and their ‘team leaders,’ then we will have lost the last chance for healthy reorganization of the movement ahead of the most critical electoral battle.”

Anna Diamantopoulou, through her associates, is expected to ally with the presidential group to strengthen her presence in the Congress’s internal ballots; nevertheless, she continues in her public interventions to criticize the leadership. She has called for the formation of a strong leadership team alongside the party leader and for the party to operate at “normal” rhythms—meaning that Harilaou Trikoupi should be open to every different view and to warnings, for example about the “stuck needle.” While this particular warning bears Geroulanos’s signature, even Androulakis’s most loyal supporters align with this realistic assessment of the data.

The possibility that PASOK could lose second place in upcoming polls (for example, once a Tsipras party is founded) “freezes” the morale of officials but also brings forces together. Those in the know point out that “bridges” of communication have recently been built among Doukas, Geroulanos, and Anna Diamantopoulou, and that discussions have advanced into analyses of all possible scenarios. What they initially agree on, according to interlocutors, is that from the start of the year PASOK must create strong events to attract attention and impose its “agenda” on the news cycle as the official opposition party. The fact that no prominent PASOK figures with an inclination to “transfer” to the former prime minister’s party appeared at Alexis Tsipras’s first two events gives Harilaou Trikoupi the time and opportunity to reassess its moves and open the game to all intra-party tendencies. Some say it is time for “bridges” of understanding to be extended also toward SYRIZA and New Left, as several officials from both opposition parties have already ruled out the possibility of aligning themselves with a Tsipras party.