Less than three months after the resignation of long-time leader Alexis Tsipras in the wake of a demoralising defeat to Greece’s ruling conservatives, the socialist opposition party Syriza looks to be taking a reformist turn following the election of the former Biden staffer and political moderate Stefanos Kasselakis to the helm of the party on Sunday evening.
A Greek-born but American-educated Goldman Sachs investment banker turned shipping magnate, the 35-year-old Kasselakis, who is openly gay, defeated former Labour Minister Effie Achtsioglou despite having no previous political experience.
Kasselakis had only returned to Greece from America this year and has ideologically aligned himself with the moderate wing of the U.S. Democratic Party, aiming to create “big-tent” style social democracy over more old-school socialism with a commitment to lower taxes and push for progressive policies on migration and social policy.
The newly anointed Syriza leader shot to prominence in late August following the release of a four-minute-long video where he outlined his life story and policy platform for the beleaguered socialists, with Kasselakis particularly popular among younger voters.
Already, traditional socialists within Syria have lamented Kasselakis’s moderate stance with one Syriza MEP Stelios Kouloglou going so far as to refer to the leadership change as “the end of leftwing Syriza as we know it.”
Founded in 2004 as a broad-ranging coalition of the Greek Left, encompassing communists to social democrats, Syriza led the country from 2015 to 2019 when it navigated choppy economic waters following Greece’s bailout by the Troika. It was accused by many on the Left of selling out its principles and national sovereignty to remain in power.
Elections in June revealed major splits within the Greek Left as Syriza failed to regain its former dominance and lost approximately a third of its seats to challengers from both the Left and the Right as ultranationalists returned to Parliament for the first time since the collapse of the Golden Dawn Party.
A former employee of the pro-Atlanticist Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, Kasselakis has vowed to take the knife to Athens’s infamous corruption with additional promises to abolish mandatory civil service and expand Greek citizenship to recent migrants.
Kasselakis is not the only DNC-adjacent European politician to take up the leadership of a Mediterranean socialist party in opposition. In Italy, former Obama campaign volunteer Elly Schlein assumed the leadership of Rome’s centre-left Democratic Party (PD) to mixed results earlier this year.
