The 35-year-old gay businessman unexpectedly emerged as leader of the left party, even though he has never held an electoral mandate in Greece.
Unknown in Greece until a few weeks ago, Stefanos Kasselakis, ex-Goldman Sachs trader, created a general surprise by being elected on Sunday at the head of the left-wing Syriza party after the withdrawal of Alexis Tsipras.
This 35-year-old businessman, who until recently lived in Miami and has never held any electoral mandate in Greece, won against Tsipras’ former Minister of Labor, Effie Achtsioglou. He won more than 56% of the votes of Syriza members at the end of an internal campaign which revealed deep divisions within the leading opposition party in Greece.
He is the first openly gay politician to head a political party in the country. The young man with an athletic build appears ostensibly with his American husband, an emergency nurse, which is out of place in a Greece where gay marriage does not exist and where certain leaders of the Orthodox Church still vilify homosexuals.
Having moved to the United States at the age of 14, Stefanos Kasselakis is a newcomer on 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 was running for party president.
Media darling
The dashing thirty-year-old then proved that he perfectly mastered the codes of communication on social networks while benefiting from the fascination he exerts on the Greek media.
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. 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. Stefanos Kasselakis also readily compares himself to the conservative leader who also studied in the United States.
His arrival at the head of Syriza comes after former Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras (2015-2019), a European figure of the radical left when he came to power in 2015, threw in the towel four days after his bitter failure in the legislative.
Stefanos Kasselakis says he wants “show another way», he whose career 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 21, a graduate of a University of Pennsylvania, Stefanos Kasselakis was hired by the American investment bank Goldman Sachs, specializing in raw materials. A 5-year experience which, he assures, allowed him to “see what capital is: buying the labor of others at a lower cost» and measure “the arrogance that money brings“.
He then entered the merchant navy by creating his own company. This sportsman, who claims to have volunteered in 2008 in the campaign team of Joe Biden, then senator, insists that “now is the time to build the Greek dream we desperately need“.
He advocates in particular the separation of Church and State, the abolition of compulsory military service and wants to emphasize the defense of the environment in a country cruelly behind in this area.
But his meteoric rise is causing many teeth to grind within Syriza. His detractors are harsh: Stefanos Kasselakis has never been elected, has never held a ministerial function and has no program. “We don’t know Kasselakis. Personally, I don’t know his intentions for the party», Commented before the vote a figure in the party, Yannis Ragousis.
In any case, Syriza is turning the page on Alexis Tsipras, who remains the man in the standoff with Greece’s creditors when the country was on the verge of leaving the euro zone in 2015.