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Stefanos Kasselakis was virtually unknown in Greece just six months ago when he was a no-chance election candidate with Syriza, the country’s main opposition party.
These days, thanks to an electoral drubbing of that party, a meteoric ascent fueled by a skillful social media campaign, his status as a former Goldman Sachs trader and a gay politician, along with his movie-star looks, he is seemingly all anyone in Greece can talk about.
Improbably, he is now the leader of Syriza, having essentially come out of nowhere to defeat a former minister for the top role a month ago. But his leadership has sent the leftist party into a tailspin, and is expected to result in one influential faction breaking away at a top-level party meeting this weekend. It has also signaled both a reorganization of leftist politics in Greece and, some analysts say, a shift in the style of the country’s politics to rely more on appearances and less on substance.
“His election is the product of the rightward drift of the previous leadership,” said Seraphim Seferiades, a professor of politics and history at Panteion University in Athens, who pointed to a similar trend across Europe and beyond where the left has strayed from some of its core principles to gain broader appeal.
“Kasselakis is a prime example of this trend, the main idea being that the adoption of sheer imagery — not just gay, but also young and energetic — will do the trick,” Mr. Seferiades added. “Well, it won’t. It will exacerbate the crisis within Syriza.”
A 35-year-old former Goldman Sachs trader who took over a party that just a decade ago blamed the global financial system for devastating Greece’s economy, Mr. Kasselakis lived for 20 years in the United States, including in Miami and New York, before breaking into politics in his homeland. He is Greece’s first openly gay party leader, and recently wed his long-term partner, an American emergency-room nurse, in Brooklyn while pressing for the legalization of same-sex marriage in Greece.