(Bloomberg) -- The Greek opposition’s new leader has less than half a year to win over voters in European Union elections – but before that he has to convince his own party. The prospects for either are looking murky.

Stefanos Kasselakis was an unlikely choice for Syriza, the radical left-wing party that railed against the EU’s austerity policies and almost forced the country out of the euro in 2015. 

The former Goldman Sachs trader was practically unknown before he ran for the leadership in September and only came out on top because of the chaos that his predecessor left behind by not endorsing any of the candidates.  

The result is a party leader whose views — supporting private universities and stock options for employees — are more in line with his Wall Street background than the old-school activists he’s now trying to lead. 

Under his watch, Syriza has started to unravel.

Former Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos, a veteran of the 2015 crisis, started the rout, quitting the party in November. Since then, Syriza has been hammered in opinion polls and almost a quarter of Kasselakis’s lawmakers have defected, leaving him with just 36 in the 300-strong legislature. 

“Kasselakis is a centrist politician with liberal views,” said Kostas Chatzieleftheriou, one of the party’s earliest members, who quit after the new leader assumed office. “You can’t install someone just because they are handsome or cool.”

When it was at the height of its power in 2015, Syriza got 36% of the national vote, and its best showing at EU elections – a year earlier – saw some 27% of the electorate back the party. Yet at the most recent national ballot in June that support had shrunk to less than 18% and the group is currently polling at around 12% or even lower.

“I took over just three months ago,” Kasselakis told Bloomberg. “Rome was not built in a day. But rest assured, we are well on our way and we will leave a legacy for generations to come.”

As a student, Kasselakis volunteered for then-Senator Joe Biden during the 2008 presidential campaign. But he only entered national politics when he stood as a candidate in 2023 elections — ballots that handed Prime Kyriakos Mitsotakis a landslide victory and an absolute majority and led to Syriza chief Alexis Tsipras’s exit. 

Kasselakis, 35, then announced his candidacy for the party leadership, building his campaign around social equality, the separation of church and state and the abolition of compulsory military service. He also portrayed himself as a self-made man building on the scholarships he won – after attending private schools in Athens – to Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and the University of Pennsylvania.

After Tsipras’s departure, former Labor Minister Effie Achtsioglou had been the frontrunner in the party elections. Yet once Kasselakis joined the campaign, a lot of Tsipras’s followers gathered around him. 

Tsipras – who had been Greece’s prime minister 2015-2019 – stayed out of the campaign, a move interpreted by party members as a lack of support for Achtsioglou, allowing Kasselakis to win easily.

“Kasselakis was favored by Tsipras’s silence,” according to Aristides Hatzis, a professor of law and economics at the University of Athens.

Indeed, Kasselakis is really just implementing the strategic pivot that began under his predecessor. Tsipras might be most famous for defying the EU’s demands for budget cuts in 2015. But he governed for another four years after that and in the end wound up overseeing a brutal austerity program. 

Kasselakis met Tsipras in Athens in 2022 and expressed an interest in joining the party. The two men hit it off and that helped fast-track the future leader into Syriza’s upper echelons. 

Center Ground

After the trauma of the crisis years, there is a certain logic to the attempts to move the party closer to the center ground. 

It’s taken almost a decade of fiscal discipline to emerge from the crisis that brought Syriza to power in the first place and with the economy seen growing by 2.3% this year, outperforming most of its European peers, Greek voters don’t seem willing to take risks. 

But without Tsipras’s charisma, the party is managing to lose its more radical supporters without persuading moderates to shift from Pasok, the Socialist party that together with Mitsotakis’s New Democracy dominated Greek politics before the sovereign debt crisis.

Kasselakis, who is Greece’s first openly gay party chief, rejects labels.

“The term ‘radical left’ does not translate perfectly in English,” Kasselakis said in an interview. “The intention is to say ‘groundbreaking left.’ The Left that is not afraid to bring forth big, ambitious ideas, solutions that might make the elites uncomfortable.”

That’s the definition, with which he identifies “fully,” he said. “My whole life and certainly my life in Greek politics has been radical-groundbreaking.”

Newly elected party leaders usually get a bump in the polls from Greek voters, but Kasselakis has had the opposite effect. Hatzis said he’s been “overexposed” and “superficial” in his policy ideas, so people aren’t read to trust him with the economy, when progress has been so hard won since the depths of the crisis almost a decade ago. 

Just a handful of further defections would see Syriza lose its mantle as the biggest opposition group to Pasok and opinion polls suggest that the Communist Party could soon supplant Kasselakis’s group as the country’s third most popular group. 

With New Democracy setting the tone and Syriza hemorrhaging support, Hatzis says that it’s more likely that a figure who lived in Miami and was unknown to Greek voters until last year won’t be around for long. A poor showing in June’s EU elections could be the trigger. 

“He is not stuck with politics because he doesn’t know how to do anything else in life,” Hatzis said. “He is a man with a career, a life outside Greece, with businesses, successes — he has an alternative.”

--With assistance from Paul Tugwell.

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