In full turmoil for months, the leftist party Syriza “ fight for his survival and his entire future », commented the center-right Greek newspaper. Kathimerinia few hours before the results of the elections organized to designate the new leader of the party that governed Greece from 2015 to 2019. On Sunday, November 24, Sokratis Famellos, 58, deputy of Thessaloniki, Greece’s second city and president of the Syriza parliamentary group, which was elected in the first round with 50.5% of the votes against three other candidates. More than 70,000 people came to vote. Just over a year ago, in September 2023, 148,000 voters mobilized to elect the party’s previous leader.
Syriza, which won the 2015 legislative elections (36.3% of the votes) with an anti-austerity discourse, cannot emerge from its internal crisis. “Since 2019, the party has not taken stock of its governance and has not understood what some of its voters, disappointed after the signing of a new austerity plan, accuse it of. Instead of talking to their base, to the unions, to the youth movements, the leaders wanted to find new voters more in the center. But they got lost.”explains Filippa Chatzistavrou, associate professor of political science at the University of Athens.
On June 25, 2023, after a disappointing result in the legislative elections against the conservative New Democracy party (17.8% against 40.6%), former Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras left the presidency of Syriza. Three months later, Stefanos Kasselakis, a former trader at the American bank Goldman Sachs, until then unknown to the battalion, was elected thanks to an active campaign on social networks.
His lack of experience, his ignorance of the Greek political scene, his desire to open the party towards the center but also the media coverage of his life with his American partner Tyler McBeth irritated the deputies and the historical leaders of Syriza. In December 2023, two months after their election, a dozen deputies slammed the door and formed a new party, called New Left.
“El Pasok collects the crumbs”
In the European elections on June 9, Syriza obtained 14.9% of the vote, that is, 9 points less than in 2019. This disappointment further weakened Stefanos Kasselakis, to the point that the party’s central committee decided organize new elections and exclude his candidacy for a new mandate.
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