Abstract. We give a sufficient condition for a local radial Phragmén-Lindelöf principle on analytic varieties. This condition is expressed in terms of existence of hyperbolic directions.Introduction 1. In a basic paper Hörmander [12] characterized when a given linear partial differential operator P (D) with constant coefficients is surjective on the space A(Ω) of all real-analytic functions on an open convex subset Ω of R n . His characterization was given in terms of global and also of local conditions of Phragmén-Lindelöf type for plurisubharmonic functions on the zero variety of the symbol P . Since then, it was shown in a number of papers that similar Phragmén-Lindelöf conditions on algebraic varieties can be used to characterize other properties of (systems of) such operators (see, e.g., Andreotti [17]. The main result of this paper, Theorem 10, gives a local geometric condition on an analytic variety near a real point ξ which guarantees that any plurisubharmonic function u on the variety that vanishes on its real points can grow only linearly, u(z) = O(|z − ξ|), near ξ. The geometric condition, which is described in Definition 9, is expressed in terms of hyperbolicity and is the local analog of a global version given in [5]. Unfortunately, the condition is not necessary, as we will show in Example 14. As in the global case, the proof of the theorem is based on a result of Sibony-Wong type for homogeneous algebraic varieties. We were led to Theorem 10 because it is a key result from pluripotential theory that is needed in our recent characterization in [8] of those surfaces in C 3 that satisfy the local Phragmén-Lindelöf condition. This characterization is applied in [8] to extend Hörmander's characterization of the surjective P (D) on A(R n ) from n = 3 to n = 4.