The latest internal rumblings within the main opposition SYRIZA party came on Thursday with a letter signed by 87 deputies and top cadres criticizing party leader Stefanos Kasselakis for his recent quip about not accepting “black money” funding.
The timing of the letter-rebuke also coincides with a decision by party leadership to terminate the daily edition of the party-affiliated “Avgi”, a historic but chronically low-selling newspaper, as well as a handful recent and very high-profile firings of party-paid functionaries deemed as opposing Kasselakis.
The latter this past week underlined that he will not accept “black money… as was done in the past.” As a result, he said, the leftist party’s funding of a daily edition of Avgi was untenable.
Besides Kasselakis, a political outsider who abruptly appeared from the United States to vie for and win a SYRIZA internal party election last September, the letter was also addressed to party secretary Rania Sviggou.
Among others, the letter reads:
“The result of the European (Parliament) elections (June 9) obliges us to review at the data of a new reality taking shape in the country, and to take the appropriate initiatives. Despite the huge drop in ND’s (New Democracy) percentages … the progressive political area, as a whole, was not strengthened, instead we saw record abstention and the rise of the extreme right. The large social majority, although they disapprove of the policies of the Mitsotakis government, do not see an alternative progressive proposal for governance. This imbalance in the political system is a democratic necessity to address.”
The letter added:
“We should be proud of the fact that our party does not owe a single euro to the banks, it has always served, in practice, transparency and was independent of financial interests. At the same time, it’s not possible to take such critical decisions over the rationalization of the party’s media, which employ workers and are a historical part of the Left, such as suspending the daily newspaper Avgi, without this being discussed in some collective body.”
