From Le Figaro with AFP
Posted 50 minutes ago
Stefanos Kasselakis, a former Goldman Sachs trader, caused widespread surprise when he was elected leader of the left-wing Syriza party on Sunday. LOUIZA VRADI / Portal
The 35-year-old gay businessman unexpectedly emerged as leader of the Left Party, despite never having held an electoral mandate in Greece.
Stefanos Kasselakis, a former Goldman Sachs trader who was unknown in Greece until a few weeks ago, caused widespread surprise when he was elected to lead the left-wing Syriza party on Sunday following the withdrawal of Alexis Tsipras.
The 35-year-old businessman, who until recently lived in Miami and never held an electoral mandate in Greece, defeated Tsipras’ former labor minister Effie Achtsioglou. He won more than 56% of Syriza members’ votes at the end of an internal campaign that exposed deep divisions within Greece’s leading opposition party.
He is the first openly gay politician to lead a political party in the country. The athletically built young man appears ostensibly with his American husband, an emergency room nurse, which is out of place in a Greece where there is no gay marriage and where certain Orthodox Church leaders still denigrate homosexuals.
Stefanos Kasselakis, who moved to the United States at the age of 14, is a newcomer to the political scene. Many Greeks first saw his face less than a month ago, when he announced in a simple video and at the very last minute that he would run for party leadership.
Media darling
The dashing thirty-year-old then proved that he has a perfect command of the communication codes on social networks and at the same time benefits from the fascination that he exerts on the Greek media.
Since he caused a surprise by coming first within Syriza in the first round of voting, television channels have followed his every move: having his morning coffee, leaving the gym, greeting his mother at the airport. He takes over the leadership of a party that was crushed in two consecutive parliamentary elections in May and June and is embroiled in internal conflicts so intense that some analysts say they could lead to a split.
In June’s parliamentary elections, Syriza received just 17.84% of the vote, more than 20 points less than Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’ New Democracy party. Stefanos Kasselakis also likes to compare himself with the conservative leader, who also studied in the USA.
His arrival at the helm of Syriza comes after former Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras (2015-2019), a European representative of the radical left when he came to power in 2015, threw in the towel four days after his bitter failure in the legislature.
Stefanos Kasselakis assures that he wants to “show a different path” whose career path is surprising in this former party of the radical left, led for fifteen years by Alexis Tsipras from the communist youth.
Five years at Goldman Sachs
At the age of 21, Stefanos Kasselakis, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, was hired by the American investment bank Goldman Sachs, which specializes in commodities. A five-year experience that, as he assures, allowed him “to see what capital is: to buy the work of others at a lower cost” and “to measure the arrogance that money brings.”
He then joined the merchant navy by starting his own company. This athlete, who claims to have volunteered on then-Senator Joe Biden’s campaign team in 2008, insists that “the time has come to realize the Greek dream that we desperately need.”
He particularly supports the separation of church and state, the abolition of conscription and wants to emphasize the protection of the environment in a country that is cruelly behind in this area.
But his meteoric rise has left Syriza gnashing its teeth. His critics are harsh: Stefanos Kasselakis was never elected, never held a ministerial position and has no program. “We don’t know Kasselakis. Personally, I don’t know his intentions for the party,” commented a party member, Yannis Ragousis, before the vote.
In any case, Syriza is turning against Alexis Tsipras, who remains the man in conflict with Greece’s creditors as the country was on the verge of leaving the eurozone in 2015.