The four-day Congress of SYRIZA over the weekend turned up into a circus with dancing elephants and cheering clowns. At the end of the day, on Sunday, all inner-party fronts agreed to bury the tomahawk and proceed “united” to the European elections beginning of June.
Until the agreement was reached, turmoil, twists and statements that provoked and puzzled the delegates every now and then created an atmosphere that was signaling the end of the “left-wing” party.
It was started on Thursday, when former SYRIZA leader and Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras accused the current leader Stefanos Kasselakis of “narcissism” and urged him to initiate new leadership elections.
Kasselakis picked up the challenge urging the delegates “Get me an opponent! Let’s elect a new leader!” He proposed the elections to take place on March 10.
One of the founding members of the party, Olga Gerovassili, declared ready to face Kasselakis in the upcoming leadership elections.
To observers, friends and foes in and outside the party, it became clear that the SYRIZA was facing an imminent new division that SYRIZA.
While the two opponents were baking their cookies in the background, delegates -obviously instructed by the current leader, started collecting signatures against the new elections and thus six months after those in September that brought Kasselakis to leadership.
The majority of delegates apparently decided against the elections and suddenly the issue went off the table and the agenda.
“…enough. The masks have fallen, we are not going to elections. We are going forward,” Kasselakis said after the vote, in a posture reminding a TEDX speaker and an American televangelist.
Kasselakis and Gerovassili told delegates “united we stand” toward the European elections, implying that everything was some kind of misunderstanding. Or Something – It was the moment I stopped following reporting from the Congress on TV -.
At the end of the day and the four-day-long Congress, Tsipras proved to be no longer the ‘absolute ruler’ of the party, that Kasselakis can be challenged anytime as he has yet to convince all party members of his ‘ideological goals’ and that there is still a fraction in the party that wants something new but is not able -or is too lazy- to articulate it.
willingness to take up the challenge and stand against him for the party’s leadership, had countered by saying that if he withdrew his challenge to the party to find him a rival, “we stop here” and commented: “Now, if you want elections in 10 days…have them yourself and see what you get.”
Kasselakis replied to Gerovasili, asking her to withdraw her candidacy so the matter might be dropped, to which Gerovasili responded by saying that it was up to the congress to decide and that she was not the one who proposed new elections.
What is also very clear it that the crisis within SYRIZA is huge and hardly manageable.
