With a smile from ear to ear, Stefanos Kasselakis showed on TikTok how he was preparing for a new challenge. He was at the hairdresser, ready to debut a new image. When the barber asked him how he wanted the cut, he responded: “Syriza,” which in Greek means to the root. The video, in which he assured that he would miss his dog very much, quickly became viral.
Kasselakis, the new face of the Greek left, cut his hair in a military style to face a new, albeit brief, stage in his life. The Syriza leader has just started service in the Army which is still mandatory for all men in Greece. He, since he was exempt because he resided in the United States from the age of 14 until he returned in the summer to face the political challenge, had not yet done so. Under Greek law, men over the age of 33 – Kasselakis is 35 – who return to Greece have two options: either do a six-month military service, or do it for only 20 days and pay 810 euros for each month they skip. . The leftist leader has opted for the second option, with which he will be sworn in on March 29, after which he will take the five days of leave that are guaranteed to new recruits and he will be officially discharged from the Army on April 5.
“It is an honor to serve my homeland, the country I love, as an expatriate who has returned to contribute to this country,” he said upon arriving at the training camp where he is assigned, near Thebes, in the Boeotia region. He was accompanied by his father, and arrived carrying a simple suitcase and a bag, under the watchful eye of the television cameras. In an interview he had already criticized the fact that the normal length of military service in Greece is at least nine months and that recruits are paid only eight euros per month.
Tebas was not his first idea, since, just after his surprise victory in the Syriza primaries, he said that he would like to do military service in a unit near the border with Turkey, Greece’s biggest rival in the region, or in one of the islands in the eastern Aegean. “I am proud of my country, but not of everything that is happening in my country,” he added, criticizing the Greek government of conservative Kyriakos Mitsotakis.
Kasselakis has faced a turbulent first few months at the head of Syriza. In September, the young politician became the unexpected winner of the primary elections of the Greek radical left party, called to elect the successor of former Prime Minister Alexis Tsirpas after his painful electoral defeat against New Democracy. He was a complete unknown until at the end of August when he burst onto the Greek political scene with a video on the networks. Although he spent his childhood in Greece, he left with his family for the US when he was only fourteen years old. His father was a majority shareholder in a shipping company and was experiencing financial difficulties. An entrepreneur and investor, he worked for a time as an analyst in London and New York for Goldman Sachs and even volunteered in the 2008 primaries for then-Senator Joe Biden. Married to an American nurse, he is also the first openly gay man to lead a political party in Greece, the first majority-Orthodox country in the world to just legalize gay marriage.
But his past as an outsider and his approach, more oriented to the center, aroused the distrust of a sector of the militancy. I did not like the fact that he wanted to exclude three former Tsipras ministers who did not hide their reluctance towards his successor. In November, 46 Syriza members, led by former Finance Minister Efklidis Tsakalotos, left the party’s 300-person central committee. Another important name, MEP Stelios Kouloglou, left the party lamenting “the lack of a serious opposition and the projection of the new president’s personal life in the public dialogue.” For the moment, Kasselakis has silenced his opponents by avoiding new primaries – requested by Tsipras –, at least until the European elections.
