Since Sunday, the left-wing Syriza party, the main opposition party in Greece, has been without a leader. The controversial Stefanos Kasselakis, elected in the primaries just a year ago, was subjected to a motion of censure this weekend, which was adopted with about half the votes in favor. Led by the “group of 87” – supporters of the former prime minister and former party leader Alexis Tsipras -, which ultimately has 100, and with the help of one of the party’s heavyweights, Pavlos Polakis, the motion succeeded in the bet that a sector of the party had been pursuing for months: to overthrow the leader. The party’s press chief, Kasselakis’ chief of staff and the party spokesman have also resigned. A situation that could have been avoided if the former leader had called early primary elections as various factions of the party have been demanding.
The scenario that is now opening is marked by uncertainty. The political secretariat of the party announced on Tuesday the convening of an extraordinary congress, to be held from November 1 to 3, with the aim of drawing up a new road map and presenting the candidacies. Pavlos Polakis and the actor Apostolos Glentzos have already announced their candidacies to lead the party. The primaries will take place on November 24, with a second round, if necessary, on December 1.
In the end, the idea of a quick procedure prevailed, as Polakis himself requested, against those who preferred to give themselves more time for the situation to stabilize after the earthquake experienced this weekend. Moreover, the political future of Stefanos Kasselakis is still unknown. Although the former leader has not yet spoken out, it is unlikely that he will run again in the primaries or form his own party. Sources close to the party assure that he could abandon political life.
A year of controversy and poisoned darts
It has not been an easy year, neither for Kasselakis nor for Syriza. Responsible for reviving the political left in Greece after the party’s failure in both calls for the 2023 general elections, when the party lost half of its MPs, Kasselakis’ leadership has been characterized by controversies and poisoned darts. It has not helped that, for all these months, the former Goldman Sachs executive has been calling himself “the voice of society.”
The “messiah”, as the Greek press then called him, never enjoyed the sympathy of the entire party. The ruptures were not long in coming: a few weeks after his election, Alexis Tsipras’ right-hand man and former Minister of Labor between 2016 and 2019, Efi Ahtsioglou (who had been his biggest opponent in the primaries), left the party and co-founded a new one: “New Left”. She did not do it alone, but with 10 members of the party and deputies.
The new Kasselakis era within Syriza had a single objective: to recover the party’s identity through the articulation of a coherent and serene political proposal to confront the conservative government of Kyriakos Mitsotakis; but the opposite has happened. The promises of unity and cohesion have dissipated to the point of becoming invisible and the formation is now facing one of the most serious crises of recent years.
In his opinion column in the Greek newspaper KathimeriniWrites journalist Nikos Konstandaras: “Why is a leader elected by the party’s rank and file and whose mandate was renewed at the party congress so questioned? By what right did the skeptics ignore the will of the voters and delegates? The answer probably lies in the fact that the party cadres never believed that Kasselakis was their legitimate leader.” And so it is: Kasselakis has always been considered a parachutist, a outsider. He had only been a member of the party for a month when he was elected. However, it was also seen by some as an opportunity for regeneration for a formation that in recent times has moved towards the centre and has left aside the postulates of the radical left.
A crisis that does not only benefit the Government
The first major beneficiaries of the deep crisis that Syriza is going through are the ruling party, the conservatives of New Democracy and the social democrats of Pasok, who, according to the polls, have already regained second place. But the party could also benefit On the road to freedom, a split from Syriza led by former Parliament Speaker Zoe Konstantopoulou, who left the party then led by Alexis Tsipras in 2016. Former Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis did so in 2015 and also founded his own party, MeRA25, currently without parliamentary representation.
Although Syriza’s results in the last European elections on June 9 were not entirely bad, the truth is that Pasok, although it is also going through its own crisis (the first round of primaries will take place on October 6) and after a long journey in the desert that began in the hardest years of the Great Recession, continues to progress in the polls and aspires to recover part of Syriza’s electorate. In the European elections in June, the distance between the two parties was minimal: Syriza obtained 14.92% of the votes and Pasok 12.79%. New Democracy won with 28.31%, in a vote in which abstention reached almost 60%.
