A former Goldman Sachs investment banker, Stefanos Kasselakis may seem an unusual leader for the Greek political party whose name means “coalition of the radical left”. Kasselakis, 35, has little activist record, has never held elected office, and his campaign in Syriza’s internal primary, in which he scored 57 per cent of the vote on 24 September, did little to spell out his policies. Yet this, too, pointed to Syriza’s departure from the old forms of left-wing party organisation. In a social-media based campaign, focused on personality more than programme, the Greek American businessman spoke of making Syriza a “big tent” force akin to the US Democrats, one which would “copy the US political formula as soon as possible”. Syriza’s primary allowed 40,000 new supporters to register, most of them apparently Kasselakis voters, though his margin of victory suggests that more longstanding members also rallied to his banner.
In a sense, this is the logical outcome of Syriza’s recent history. Under the former Communist Youth leader Alexis Tsipras, Syriza formed a government in 2015 which promised to resist austerity while remaining in the eurozone. Yet faced with Troika intransigence, Tsipras chose to impose devastating cuts rather than pursue the confrontation with EU institutions advocated by dissidents within his party. Once this battle was lost – and Tsipras’s left-wing critics were purged – Syriza’s approach to everything from border controls to foreign policy became almost indistinguishable from that of the Third Way-style centre left. Even once Syriza returned to opposition in 2019 it did not resume its crusade against neoliberalism, but worked to consolidate the political space it had won from the social-democratic party Pasok. Now Kasselakis promises to “unequivocally embrace the political centre”.
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