With the speech of the president Stefanos Kasselakis, the crucial meeting of the SYRIZA-PS Central Committee begins today at 12:00 noon.

As he announced on Friday with a video message that he posted on his social media accounts, Stefanos Kasselakis will ask the Central Committee to approve referendum in order for the members and friends of the party to decide on the deletions of the four executives he has referred to the party’s Ethics Committee, Nikos FriendBanner ScarlettDimitris Vitsa and Stefano Jumaka.

Specifically, in his message, Mr. Kasselakis states: “The official opposition is not corrupt like the government, but sick, with officials who insult their president and the hundreds of thousands of citizens. I will not back down, I will honor the command I received, SYRIZA will become a single healthy party with the only tendency is democracy from the base. The operation of a party, let alone the Official Opposition, is too serious a matter to be a matter of postponements and intentional or unintentional delays. For this reason tomorrow I will ask the Central Committee to decide to hold a referendum directly from the members and friends of the party on the dismissal of the 4 executives who have brutally insulted us all. If K.E. refuses, I will proceed with the holding of the referendum at the request of 15% of the members of SYRIZA, exactly as our statute provides.”

The decision of Mr. Kasselakis surprised and provoked reactions from his internal party opponents as well as discussions between his supporters in the parliamentary group and in the Central Committee. It is indicative that last night different tendencies of the party, the “presidents”, the Umbrella and the “6+6” were meeting to examine the data and determine their position in the Central Committee.

Moreover, in his intervention in the “Sto Kokkino” r/s, Mr. Kasselakis stated: “The main thing is to be a healthy party that will give camaraderie, not insult all its members for no reason. A camaraderie, a tolerance. This is healthy. This is what we reward. Let’s listen to the base of the party. The base of the party wants us to become the governing Left. Which means a lot of things to a lot of people.”

Departures

Yesterday, two members of the party’s Central Committee, Panos Skourletis and the former speaker of the Parliament, Nikos Voutsis, announced their departure from the party.

In his announcement, Mr. Skourletis states: “The developments in SYRIZA-PS have taken a path of no return. The latest heavy electoral defeats are the culmination of a series of wrong choices made after 2019. The forces that currently dominate SYRIZA-PS are implementing a plan of division and rupture that the neo-coup and out of touch with the Left and St. politics undertook to complete. Kasselakis”.

In his own announcement, Mr. Voutsis informs that “I will not attend tomorrow’s meeting of the Central Committee since with this letter I will no longer be a member of the party, of which I was a co-founder and co-shaper of its identity and policies until today. I appreciate that our party, instead of the necessary regrouping with all its forces, is now unfortunately experiencing a situation that resembles a political irreparable damage. A party is being formed, with the sole responsibility of the new president and the new leadership team around him, which is unacknowledged for the time being moving away from the Left and will, over time, compete in the area of ​​the political Center”.

Two days earlier, former minister Giorgos Stathakis had announced his own departure from SYRIZA who was one of the main supporters of Euclid Tsakalotos in his bid for the leadership of SYRIZA. “…All dialogue of substance has lost its scope. Every concept of a red line has already been trampled upon, before the presidential election and beyond. Unfortunately, the Left has no place in the “Kasselakis-Papa-Polaks party”, he says, among other things.

The week opened with the event of the newspaper “Epochi” which is friendly to “Ombrela”. There Mr. Tsakalotos announced his own departure: “When I ran for president, I said win or lose I want to bring back the pride of the people of the Left. I’m sorry, I find it extremely difficult to have this pride in this party. The question is whether with this toxic climate, we can be in this party.”

Two days after the event, a text was published with 1300 signatures of Umbrella members. Among other things, the text states: “We, who sign this text, members of SYRIZA-PS, are deeply concerned and worried about the present and especially about the future of our party. We all realize that SYRIZA-PS is on the run. Until recently, many of us harbored the hope or delusion that a legitimate and institutionally guaranteed confrontation was taking place within SYRIZA, which could be resolved through collective democratic processes. A common denominator in our concerns today is the collective sense that we belong to a party that tends not to be, on any political grounds, associated with the Left. Everything we knew about the character and social priorities of SYRIZA is changing, changing violently and unilaterally. Despite all this, or precisely for all that we live, the way out is the Left.”