In what appears to be a first step in a campaign to regain his seat as president of SYRIZA, Stefanos Kasselakis on Thursday released a slick video encouraging people to register for the internal leadership election, while arguing that the leftist party can move the country forward.
The video begins with Kasselakis walking around central Athens, making a series of apologies to those SYRIZA, as he said, has disappointed: “To the young people who put us in the lead in the European elections, to the families of the old campaigners who shared a bite of bread, not a handful of offices, to the 150,000 citizens who stood in the queues just a year ago.”
Kasselakis calls for a new more unified SYRIZA that will be a “renewed, indestructible and incorruptible party of the modern left.” Though he does not explicitly announce his candidacy for president of the party, he urges would-be to register and promises not to let them down.
Kasselakis was deposed as president of SYRIRZA following a successful vote of censure against him by a majority of the party’s central committee members early last month.
Kasselakis, a former Goldman Sachs junior trader, was an outsider to Greece’s highly cliquish political scene and a surprise winner in the SYRIZA party election last September to succeed former prime minister Alexis Tsipras.
Polls conducted prior to the video, conducted by the GPO firm and presented by the Star channel, show Alexis Tsipras as the most suitable leader of SYRIZA, as the latter picked up 42.8% of respondents’ preferences. In second place, with a considerable gap, is Kasselakis at 17.9%. Former minister and MP Socrates Famellos took third place with 13.7%, followed by former minister and MP Pavlos Polakis with 7.4%, Olga Gerovassili, another former minister and current MP, with 4.7%, MEP Nikolas Farantouris with 2.3%, and television actor and former provincial mayor Apostolos Gletsos with 1.2%.
