He succeeds former Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras at the head of Syriza, currently the leading opposition party in Greece.
2 mins
With our correspondent in Athens, Joel Bronner
At the end of a two-round election that began a week earlier, activists of the left party awarded victory on Sunday to this 35-year-old businessman, a newcomer to the Greek political scene, who won with more than 56% of the votes against Efi Achtsioglou, former Minister of Labor in the Syriza government. It is up to him to bring new life to a party that is losing momentum. “ Thank you to the 150,000 Syriza members who went to vote last Sunday and today, even though there were sometimes long queues. They are proof that Syriza is still there, that the party is here to last and that from now on, Syriza will win! “, were his first words as party leader.
In June, after a defeat in the legislative elections, Alexis Tsipras resigned from his position as president of Syriza. Prime Minister of Greece from 2015 to 2019, Alexis Tsipras was, from the beginning, the incarnation of this left-wing party, which the economic crisis helped to bring to power.
Now, the new face of Syriza is that of Stefanos Kasselakis, a thirty-year-old with a sporty physique, who worked in the banking sector and then the merchant navy. This unknown on the Greek political scene until a month ago, openly homosexual, saw his candidacy supported by the very keen interest shown in him by the media in his country. Since he caused a surprise by coming first in the first round of voting within Syriza, the television channels have followed him in all his movements: morning coffee, leaving the gym, welcoming his mother at the airport.
If this political newcomer was able to convince the Syriza activists, what remains now is the one that some of the media call the “golden boy” – he was a trader at Goldman Sachs and left to live in the United States at 14 -, to embody the post-Tsipras era and to convince the authorities of the party he is preparing to lead that it is not a casting error.
However, he takes the head of a party crushed during the two successive legislative elections of May and June, and prey to internal conflicts of such acuteness that they could, according to some analysts, lead to a split. During the June legislative elections, Syriza received only 17.84% of the vote, more than 20 points less than Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s New Democracy.