Ousted SYRIZA leader and new party founder Stefanos Kasselakis on Monday evening outlined the ideological platform of his new political formation, appearing on a prime-time current affairs program.

His television appearance came a day after MP and former minister Socrates Famellos succeeded him at the helm of the leftist party and two days after he unveiled his own party. Famellos picked up nearly half of the roughly 70,000 votes in an internal party election on Sunday – a race that Kasselakis was prevented from joining in an attempt to regain his seat after being deposed by the party’s central committee members.

Referring to the latter party, he expressed a bitterness in that “the legally elected president was deprived of the opportunity to challenge for his re-election via the ballot box … the old political system has soured, and it has disappointed the people… SYRIZA is now another party; Famellos cannot inspire anything different, either.”

In presenting his new party, called the Movement for Democracy, the one-time junior Goldman Sachs trader and US-based businessman said it lies in center-left political spectrum and would be “deeply participatory and democratic … it can surely represent the values of the left and appear worthy of the (Greek) left’s struggles.”

In touching on Saturday’s gala-like presentation of his new party and its policy positions, the 36-year-old Kasselakis said much of the reactions in the aftermath cited a “clear ideological” identity. At the same time, he side-stepped a question on which disgruntled and defected SYRIZA MPs would follow him to the new party.

“So, I am very happy to hear this said by the pundits…Of course, we believe that the sea has borders, but at the same time that doesn’t mean that we’ll turn a blind eye to the (migrant) pushbacks that are happening at the moment; it does not mean that we will treat those suffering souls of migrants in an inhumane manner, as is happening at the moment. Another example is the entire concept of entrepreneurship, which was maligned by the (political) space which I (recently) belonged to, and as you can see, I’ve now placed very high on our agenda – entrepreneurship and innovation.”

The quip on “sea borders” was a distinct scoff at a high-profile – and oft-derided – comment made by former prime minister and SYRIZA president Alexis Tsipras before the party’s snap election victory in September 2015.

Tsipras, whose successor at SYRIZA’s helm was the newcomer Kasselakis, during a televised press conference in early September 2015 – on the sidelines of the Thessaloniki international Fair (TIF) – had caustically wondered if the sea has boundaries, while answering himself without hesitation: “…what borders? Does the sea have boundaries that we don’t know about?”

Tsipras was attempting to deflect sharp criticism of his first coalition government’s tenure (January-July 2015) and its policy vis-à-vis the unprecedented migrant crisis that erupted in the eastern Aegean with the passage of more than a million third country nationals, mostly from the strife-plagued Middle East, from Turkey to Greece in order to reach preferred destinations in western Europe.