SYRIZA decides against inner party elections

The inner party thriller in the main opposition SYRIZA party concluded on Sunday noon, with the Congress deciding not to go to leadership elections. “We are not heading to elections-the masks have fallen,” declared the party leader Stefanos Kasselakis. An unprecedented toxic party congress preceded that, marked by crowd uproar and political back-and forth.

On Sunday, Kasselakis clashed with his only likely co-candidate Olga Gerovasiili, over the date of a potential leadership vote. The matter was eventually voted down by the congress attendees, who supported a proposal by three other prominent SYRIZA figures who opined that a new leadership vote was untimely and unnecessary.

In last fall’s SYRIZA leadership contest, all candidates, to an extent, claimed to best represent the legacy of departed leader Alexis Tsipras. Not the leader whose departure was forced by two successive electoral disasters, but the one who had taken a party that barely registered 5% in the polls to unprecedented heights and the country’s first left-led government, from 2015-19. In the September 2023 leadership contest, won by political neophyte Kasselakis, 35, Tsipras did not take sides.

As acrimony swept the party, with 11 MPs departing to form New Left, and a Euro-MP announcing a new Green party last week, Tsipras also stayed silent, although he let intermediaries register his concerns. That is, until Thursday, just a couple of hours before the start of SYRIZA’s congress. In a posting, Tsipras called for a new leadership contest, five months after the previous ones, and criticized both Kasselakis and his opponents for fragmenting the left and benefiting ruling New Democracy. He seemed to be echoing Kasselakis’ call to his many critics that remained in SYRIZA to “put up or shut up” by fielding a challenger or rally behind him and let him carry out his mandate.

People in contact with Tsipras say that he had been extremely concerned with the party’s continuing slide in the polls – SYRIZA is now behind the socialist PASOK – and the atmosphere of permanent crisis in the party, even after the departure of Kasselakis’ most vocal opponents. He is also said to be angry at Kasselakis for having criticized, without naming him, aspects of Tsipras’ governance and party leadership, and of trying to reinvent the party as a vaguely center-left formation.