A Greek American shipping investor and former banker who emerged seemingly out of nowhere to assume the reins of Greece’s main leftwing opposition party Syriza has been deposed after a late night meeting of the party’s secretariat.
After a drama-filled gathering of Syriza’s political secretariat on Thursday, Stefanos Kasselakis was told the party’s highest body had voted overwhelmingly and conclusively in favour of his removal.
By Friday the 36-year-old had left Syriza’s headquarters, amid reports of cadres barred from even entering his parliamentary office.
It was a humbling end to a rollercoaster 11 months in office for the country’s first openly gay party leader.
After two days of acrimonious talks, Syriza’s central committee had declared on Sunday that Kasselakis had been ousted in a motion of no confidence. From his luxury villa on the island of Spetses, the businessman contested the decision, writing on X “I’m still here” and urging his supporters to avoid public displays of anger and exhibit self-restraint. The challenge to his ousting forced the political secretariat to convene an emergency session that wrapped up on Thursday night.
Kasselakis was a political neophyte when he took over the party in September last year. Some leftwingers, disgusted by his lack of ideological affiliation and perceived rightwing populism, broke away in protest and formed a splinter group called the New Left.
This week he argued that the decision to get rid of him had been brought about via “a secret ballot” and had gone against the more than 136,000 party members who had voted him into the office after the abrupt resignation of Alexis Tsipras, the former premier who had previously led the leftwing bloc.
Insiders said Kasselakis had not ruled out participating in leadership elections in late November.
“What we’ve just seen is the overwhelming majority of Syriza cadres coming to the conclusion that so many had come to earlier: that Kasselakis was not the right man for the post,” the leftwing writer Dimitris Psarras told the Guardian.
“He ran Syriza as if it were a company, conducting meetings via Zoom, disregarding the decision-making organs that are so much of every party’s ‘internal’ life, showing little respect for colleagues, thinking he could govern by simply firing people left and right. In the end everyone was against him.”
By the time his expulsion was confirmed on Friday, the Greek American was being branded a “Trump of the Balkans” who had to go. “Hopefully this will be the last instalment of a drama that has often seemed like a crazy Netflix series,” said Psarras. “Polls had shown support for Syriza plummeting with Kasselakis at the helm.”
In a survey released on Wednesday Syriza was polling at 9.3% and had fallen to third place behind the centre-left Pasok party.
Kasselakis, who moved to the US as a teenager after being awarded a scholarship, had deftly used social media to reach a wider audience in the run-up to elections last year. Leading figures in the party had come to his aid but by this week even they had retreated.
“Supporting Kasselakis was a mistake,” said Pavlos Polakis, a former alternate health minister whose backing for the entrepreneur was seen as decisive in his winning the leadership race. “Last summer I believed we needed to rebuild Syriza after Tsipras’ resignation,” he told Open TV on Friday. “Seeing his appeal to young people, I believed he could lead Syriza’s reorganisation … but he failed in many respects. He didn’t form a political team. Leftist parties aren’t one-man shows,” he added echoing the view that too much attention had been placed on Kasselakis’s lifestyle while in office.
Kasselakis had vowed from the outset to apply root-and-branch change to Syriza by embracing centrist views and transforming it into a US-style “big tent” democratic party.
This week his dwindling group of supporters said there was “still a chance” he could seek to establish his own party. “It seems that he liked his time in politics heading a political party,” said Psarras. “It’s too early to rule out his departure from the Greek political scene.”
