Greece's leftist Syriza party elects new leader

ATHENS, Greece -- Syriza, the left-wing party which once governed Greece, on Sunday elected a new leader after a year of internal turmoil and diminishing popularity.

Sokratis Famellos, 58, defeated fellow lawmaker Pavlos Polakis and two other candidates in a vote open to all party members and people aligned to the group. Results showed Famellos was just shy of the 50% plus one vote threshold required to avoid a runoff when Polakis conceded with about 43%.

Syriza’s electoral appeal has been steadily eroding. After winning over 35% of the vote in 2015 to enter government in alliance with a populist conservative party, it dropped to 31% in 2019, when the conservative New Democracy party regained power.

It received just 14% in the European elections last June. Recent opinion polls show party support dropping to single digits, while defections among lawmakers mean it is no longer the main opposition group in parliament, having been displaced by the socialist PASOK.

Just over 70,000 voted in Sunday’s election, fewer than half the number in the previous election, in September 2023, when Stefanos Kasselakis, a political neophyte and businessman who had lived for most of his life in the United States, triumphed. Kasselakis, ousted by a vote of no confidence in September 2024, on Saturday announced his own party, Movement for Democracy.