Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said his conservative party had triggered a “political earthquake” with a landslide victory in Sunday’s election, but hinted he would seek another election in order to secure an absolute majority that allow the party to govern alone.
With most votes counted, his New Democracy party won 40.8% of the vote, a 20-point lead over Alexis Tsipras’s left-wing Syriza party, which had 20.1%.
Despite the clear lead, projections by Greece’s interior ministry showed New Democracy falling six seats short of an outright majority in parliament, leaving Mitsotakis with the option of forming a coalition or holding a new vote to get a decisive result.
The 55-year-old player made his preference clear.
“Citizens want a strong government with a four-year horizon,” he said.
“Today’s political earthquake calls us all to speed up the process for a definitive government solution,” he added.
Tsipras also indicated that a new vote was likely, saying that “the election cycle is not over yet.”
The next battle, he said, will be “critical and final.”
New Democracy party supporters were in a celebratory mood as exit polls suggested they were well ahead in the election. [Louiza Vradi/Reuters]
Starting Monday, Greek President Katerina Sakellaropoulou will give three days in turn to the three main parties — New Democracy, Syriza and the socialist PASOK — to form a coalition government.
If all fail, Sakellaropoulou will appoint an interim government to prepare for new elections about a month later.
Earlier in the day, as exit polls suggested New Democracy was on course to emerge as the largest party in parliament, its officials indicated they would prefer to seek a second vote.
“We have said that we want to govern directly because that would guarantee stability and the way forward. So we have the right to ask that of the Greek people in the next election,” Public Order Minister Takis Theodorikakos told Skai television shortly after the polls closed on Sunday evening.
The election was held under a new proportional representation law, making it particularly difficult for any party to win enough parliamentary seats to form a government on its own.
If a second election is held, likely in late June or early July, the law will change again, moving to a system that rewards the leading party with extra seats and makes it easier for the favorite to win a parliamentary majority.
Political disengagement among young people
Sunday’s election is Greece’s first since its economy came under strict supervision by international lenders that had provided bailout funds during the country’s nearly decade-long financial crisis.
Mitsotakis, a 55-year-old Harvard-educated former bank executive and consultant to global management companies, won the last election in 2019 on a promise of business-oriented reforms and has pledged to continue cutting taxes , increase investments and strengthen the employment of the middle class. .
Its popularity took a hit after a February 28 rail disaster that killed 57 people after an intercity passenger train accidentally pulled into the same rail line as an oncoming freight train. It was later revealed that the train stations were understaffed and the security infrastructure was broken and outdated.
Thousands of people, many of them university students like the victims of the rail disaster, organized rallies in Greek cities to protest what they saw as government neglect.
Still, with the economy growing at 5.9 percent in 2022 and unemployment and inflation falling, opinion polls showed the prime minister steadily leading ahead of the election.
George Tzogopoulos, a professor at the Democritus University of Thrace, told Al Jazeera that young people were dissatisfied with the political class as a whole. “But what happened is that they did not show up to vote, they expressed their anger with demonstrations or through social networks. [instead],” he said.
“This is how New Democracy achieved such impressive success,” Tzogopoulos added.
Turnout reached 60 percent, with lower abstentions than previously feared.
Welcoming the results, 62-year-old retiree Glykeria Tzima said: “Democracy won today, not just New Democracy, but democracy as a whole.
“We want to see a continuation of what was created in the last four years and leave the toxicity behind. We, the Greeks, went through difficult times and saw that with this government and this prime minister we have a future.”
University student Petros Apostolakis, however, was disappointed.
“I’m not very happy [with the results] … Over the last few years, I have seen [the] The New Democracy party implements agendas that have nothing to do with the interests of my generation,” he told Al Jazeera in Athens, citing climate change and high housing prices as some of the issues left behind aside
Tsipras was prime minister during some of the most tumultuous years of Greece’s economic crisis, but the 48-year-old has struggled to regain the broad support he enjoyed when he came to power in 2015 on a promise to reverse the measures of austerity imposed by the rescue.
In some areas, the party belonged to the third, but previously dominated, Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK), led by 44-year-old Nikos Androulakis.
Senior Syriza official Dimitris Papadimoulis, vice president of the European Parliament, told state broadcaster ERT that, if confirmed, the result would be “significantly far” from the party’s goals and would mark a failure to rally the opposition into government .
PASOK is likely to be at the center of coalition talks, although any discussion is likely to be challenging.
Androulakis has a bad relationship with Mitsotakis, whom he accuses of covering up a wiretapping scandal in which his phone was targeted for surveillance.
His relationship with Tsipras — whom he has accused of trying to steal PASOK voters — is also difficult.
