The conservative Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the current Greek prime minister, has appeared very smiling tonight in Athens. He has plenty of reasons to be satisfied: his party, New Democracy, has forcefully won the general elections that were held this Sunday in the country. The right has accumulated 40% of the votes, a larger result than the polls predicted, and which doubles the support achieved by Alexis Tsipras's Syriza, which has slowed to just 20% in a monumental setback for the squeezer Minister who between 2015 and 2019 embodied the hopes of the European radical left.
The result, however, does not allow Mitsotakis to govern alone because he is far from the 45% of the votes necessary for an absolute majority. These elections were the first to be held with the new proportional system introduced by Syriza, which eliminated the bonus of up to 50 seats for the winning party, in force in previous elections, to favor the formation of coalitions. During his first term, Mitsotakis again reformed the electoral system to reintroduce this bonus, but the Greek Constitution dictates that it cannot enter into force in the legislature immediately after its approval, but in the following elections.
Given this scenario, Greece will most likely be faced with an electoral repetition, surely at the beginning of July, in which, if these results are repeated, Mitsotakis will aspire to an absolute majority with the bonus of up to 50 seats. Before, the president of the country, Katerina Sakellaropoulou, will have to commission the leaders of the most voted parties to form a government to study if a coalition is possible, some negotiations will in all probability fail since none of the three largest parties has the will to negotiate.
In his first statements after the victory, Mitsotakis has claimed the result as a "political earthquake" and made it clear that he does not want a "fragile government", which is why he has opened the doors to the second ballot, in the summer. "The result of the polls shows that New Democracy has the support of the people to govern in a strong and autonomous way," he stressed.
Mitsotakis' tabletop coup makes it clear that he has convinced Greeks with his economic message, after Greece experienced rapid economic growth, foreign investment increased and debt fell 35 percentage points in his first term. the last two years. It remained to be seen if he would suffer electoral wear due to what some analysts have defined as an authoritarian drift of the prime minister, accused of extorting migrants to Turkey and implicated in a huge spying scandal on politicians, journalists and businessmen by the EYP secret services, which has even affected the phone of the Social Democratic leader of Pasok, Nikos Androulakis. Although he acknowledged that they had been carried out, he denied being involved in the so-called "Greek Watergate" or having any knowledge of the matter, despite the fact that after taking power he put the secret services under his control.
Nor has it suffered from the public unrest caused by the train crash in March, which left 57 victims, most of them university students. The accident sparked huge demonstrations across the country, but analysts were already warning that they were not directly against the government, but against the entire Greek establishment system.
The Greek vote brings bad news for former Prime Minister Tspiras, who had expected Syriza to reach the symbolic threshold of 30% support, and has fallen 10 points below. He has already called Mitsotakis to congratulate him on the win. Tsipras appeared in these elections with a more moderate face than eight years ago, with the desire to form a "progressive cooperation government" that would end the "nightmare" of the right-wing executive of the last four years. He vowed to legalize gay marriage and protect the rule of law, trying to capitalize on the wiretapping scandal that has engulfed New Democracy. It was clear that he would not win, but if he was a short distance from the right he would win chances to come back in the next scrutiny. Now, these hopes have become very complicated.
After Syriza were the Social Democrats of Pasok-Kinal with 12% of the vote, followed by the Communist Party of Greece (7%) and the far-right Greek Solution (4.5%). On the other hand, the leftist MeRA25, of the popular former Finance Minister Yanis Varufakis, would not enter Parliament by not exceeding the necessary threshold of 3% of the votes.
