The Kasselakis mystery
The surprise lies not so much an unknown young man presenting himself as the savior of our politics, but that he nearly achieved his aim of being elected leader of the official opposition in the first round of voting. Thousands of people voted for him, setting him on track to become the fourth-highest ranking state official (after the president, prime minister and speaker of Parliament) without knowing anything about him. The very absurdity of the leap into the unknown is perhaps the best (if not only) explanation for Stefanos Kasselakis’ apparent success: Those who vote for him do not consider it a problem that they do not know him – they vote for him precisely because they don’t know him.
That is why SYRIZA’s old cadres did not have the reflexes to handle the challenge ex machina. They were not armed with antibodies to absorb, to neutralize the foreign body that invaded the very top of the party. The unorthodox candidacy found room to grow in the party’s slipshod institutions and careless procedures. Kasselakis was also helped by the clumsy and stereotyped reactions of his fellow candidates. Their pointing out that he wanted to change everything without anyone knowing who he was or what this meant, did not harm him. In fact, it benefited him.
Analysis of the first round of voting suggests that many of Kasselakis’ supporters were people who wanted to punish the candidates who had dared challenge Alexis Tsipras, pushing him to resign. Others appear to have been members of other parties who wanted to cause trouble for SYRIZA. There were also SYRIZA members who wanted to express their anger at things that have upset them in the party (arrogance, factionalism etc). In other words, many saw in Kasselakis what they wanted to see. This worked in his favor, as did the fact that the “system” was fighting him.
In these murky political and ideological waters, the very conformist Kasselakis (Goldman Sachs, shipowner, good student etc) can present himself as antisystemic, as a disruption, without explaining just what he intends to do. Revolutionary verbiage is popular with those who are sick of politics. This is, after all, an international trend. But there is another significant factor that works in Kasselakis’ favor – curiosity. In the popular TV game, “Money or the Box,” very often we would see participants choosing the unknown contents of a box rather than the sure money that they had won. On Monday, we, too, shall see what prize the mysterious Kasselakis bears.
