Syriza bases have decided to change pace and move away from the traditional line of the Greek left. This emerges from the results of the second round of primaries that took place this Sunday. Estéfanos Kaselakis, a 35-year-old former Goldman Sachs manager, gay and liberal, defeated the lawyer and left-wing activist since his youth Efi Ajchioglu (38) by a wide margin. After 70% of the votes were counted, the new party leader received 56% of the vote, compared to 44% for his rival, leading Syriza to declare the result official.
Kaselakis fits neither the image nor the classical language of the Hellenic left. He is 35 years old, married to another man – in the US because Greece does not allow same-sex marriage – and has had a longer and more successful career in business than in politics. He worked at Goldman Sachs and was CEO of a shipping company. In the only elections in which he ran as a Syriza candidate, last June, he did not hold a prominent position and did not win a seat. At the time, he was unknown to the majority of party members who elected him as the new leader that Sunday.
The winner arrived at the party headquarters on his motorcycle at midnight. I couldn’t smile anymore. Dozens of supporters were waiting for him there, especially young people, who shouted: “Estéfanos, change everything!” He replied: “We will change it together.” His first words were aimed at the victims of Dana Daniel, who have not yet found their home. “Today, light and hope for the future have been won,” he declared, “so that our youth do not have to continue to go abroad.” Before finishing her speech, Kaselakis hugged her husband – whom the Greek media refers to as “her partner”. Moments before, he was told in English, “Tyler, you’re the reason I’m here.”
The candidate against Kaselakis, Efi Ajtsioglu, represented the continuation option; the one that chose coherence with the aesthetics – and ethics – of the most powerful party in all of Europe in 2015, to the left of the Social Democrats. The 38-year-old lawyer looks back on an extensive political career. She began military service in youth training and was Minister of Labor in the last legislative period under the chairmanship of Alexis Tsipras. Until the emergence of the Kaselakis phenomenon, all parts of the party assumed that she would be the leader for the next few years.
In the campaign for these primaries, Kaselakis demonstrated tremendous communication effectiveness. His team of collaborators flooded social networks with his videos and managed to combine formal recordings with pills in which the candidate showed personal aspects of his life. Mastering the art of getting his message out is no small achievement in a country where both supporters and critics emphasize that the current prime minister’s main weapon is his strong communications team. For this reason, internal Syriza sources believe that the virtue of the winner is that he can be “the Mitsotakis of the left.”
188,000 members were eligible to vote at the 538 polling stations installed across the country. Just over 133,000 did so, about 13,000 fewer than in the first round. Although party spokesmen took pains to use phrases like “historic event” and “spectacular turnout” last Sunday, when nearly 147,000 members voted, the numbers were actually similar to Tsipras’ last re-election in 2022. Although his term was four years, the historic leader resigned after the poor result in the double elections in May and June.
Join EL PAÍS to follow all the news and read without restrictions.
Subscribe to
The bet on Kaselakis obviously has political significance. It is a commitment to something new in the face of painful defeats. It is also an attempt to challenge Mitsotakis for the political center. The current Prime Minister has pursued policies that cannot easily be classified on the right-left axis. On the one hand, it has set itself a very tough profile in immigration policy that competes with right-wing extremist formations. But his economic policy combines elements of liberalism with the generalization of subsidies. In this way, Mitsotakis received votes from sectors that traditionally do not vote right.
Syriza’s move to the center is not new. When Alexis Tsipras won his first election in 2015, Syriza was an acronym for “Radical Left Coalition.” In 2012 it ceased to be a coalition but retained its name. In 2019, they added the acronym PS, which means “Progressive Alliance” in Greek. The move to see itself as progressive rather than radical left was accompanied by the incorporation of certain figures from Pasok, the socialist party. The election of Kaselakis is another step in this direction. Syriza wants to conquer the political space of Pasok – which is now the third largest force with 11% of the vote – in order to become the only left reference capable of winning elections.
Efi Ajtsioglu reacted completely differently than when he found out he hadn’t won the first round. He then said the militants did not know what they voted for. However, this Sunday she didn’t even wait for the official results and was among the first to call her opponent to congratulate him on his victory. He also posed for the cameras with a smile and stated that the party must put forward a united and determined opposition. It is a gesture that has a clear aim: to sew up the wounds left by a campaign in which the candidates suffered fierce attacks and both denounced the other’s irregular tactics.
His biggest difficulty now is that he is not a deputy. How do you lead the opposition from outside the chamber? For him to enter parliament, four MPs would have to resign and two of them, Eleni Akritas and Ozon Iliopulos, have already said they are not ready to give up their seats.
His other big challenge is taking control of a party he barely knows. In doing so, she draws primarily on the experience of MPs Pavlos Polakis and Nikos Pappas as well as Tsipras, Yorgos and Alexis. Syriza sources have assured this newspaper that the former prime minister has already informed Kaselakis that he is at his disposal to help him build the alternative that defeats Mitsotakis.
Follow all international information on Facebook and Twitteror in our weekly newsletter.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits