ATHENS – Unable to make a dent in the lead of the ruling New Democracy since taking over the party in September, 2023, major opposition SYRIZA chief Stefanos Kasselakis now finds himself in another battle with dissidents.

His former mentor and provocative ex-deputy health minister Pavlos Polakis turned on him after Kasselakis removed him from the parliamentary group for a verbal attack on an aide to Health Minister Adonis Georgiadis.

That led to a female member of SYRIZA condemning him but after being ousted Polakis said he would push the central committee on Sept. 7-8 to replace Kasselakis, stepping up his criticism after they had been close.

Kasselakis, a Greek-American businessman who came out of nowhere to take over the party when then leader and former premier Alexis Tsipras resigned after being beaten for a second time by Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, also was ripped by eight members of the so-called Group of 87 who walked out of a party meeting.

“It is clear what I said and what I will do,” Polakis wrote, with some urging him to take on Kasselakis after helping him win the party leadership and standing by him when a group of dissidents broke off to form a new party, the New Left.

The normally calm Kasselakis launched into a tirade against the eight who left a Political Secretariat meeting and said in a video that, “There is an organized plan: the daily humiliation of SYRIZA until the (party) congress, so that no one stays.”

It represented another likely schism in the already splintered party with Kasselakis finding himself almost surrounded by critics testing him with the eight essentially out and taking another shot at him.

“We leave the insults of Stefanos Kasselakis to the judgment of the members and friends of SYRIZA, the whole progressive world of the country and the Greek people,” they reportedly said.

They added: “We are unable to follow the confusion which he is in, since once again he raised the issue of leadership alone, through evening posts, while a few hours earlier, at the meeting of the political secretariat, when everything was said, he stated that he won’t pick up the gauntlet.”

It’s a social media political war with technology allowing rivals to duke it out online without facing reporters and he went on Facebook to tell his critics to “decide if you belong in SYRIZA or not.”