The conservative party of Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis won a landslide election victory on Sunday but fell short of winning an outright majority in the 300-seat parliament.
Summary
The conservative party of Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis won a landslide election victory on Sunday but fell short of winning an outright majority in the 300-seat parliament.
- The ruling New Democracy Party secured 40% of the popular vote, finishing twenty points ahead of its leading rival, the far-left Syriza party.
- However, Greece’s newly enacted proportional representation system prevented New Democracy from winning a majority of seats.
- The new electoral law gives the leading party two options if it falls short of a majority: to form a coalition with smaller parties, or to hold a second election that grants 50 extra seats to the winning party to make it easier to form a government without a coalition.
- Mitsotakis indicated on Sunday that he would seek a second election to try and secure a majority. The new election would likely be held in June or July.
- “Mr. Mitsotakis described the preliminary outcome as a “political earthquake” that called for an “experienced hand to the helm” of Greece,” according to the New York Times. ““We kept the country upright and we’ve laid the foundations for a better nation,” Mitsotakis told his supporters.
- Politico contextualized the remarkable nature of Mitsotakis’ victory. His government is the first since 2000 to gain support after its first term in office, and came despite bad press over a spying scandal and economic concerns, specifically rising inflation.
- According to the Guardian, “Syriza’s unexpectedly poor performance appeared to uphold the view that Greeks had voted for stability – despite many being perturbed by what has been perceived as democratic backsliding under the centre-right government, with the spy scandal highlighting those concerns.” The far-left Syriza scored an upset victory in the 2015 elections, but the leftists have fallen in the polls ever since and haven’t repeated their 2015 performance.
- The Daily Mail attributed New Democracy’s failure to secure a majority of seats to the “bitter fallout over a train crash that killed 57 people.”
- The Wall Street Journal reported “Mitsotakis’ advantage on Sunday was far larger than opinion polls had predicted, showing that Greek voters want him to continue to steer the country’s economy toward recovery and that opposition parties failed to offer a convincing alternative vision. An official projection put New Democracy only six seats short of a majority.”
- Fox News Digital interviewed Endy Zemenides, the Executive Director of the Hellenic American Leadership Council, about the elections. “Prime Minister Mitsotakis is a unique figure in world politics. He embodies a center right that seems to have faded away in Western democracy,” said Zemenides. “His free enterprise and national security credentials wouldn’t surprise anyone, but his stances on climate change, abortion, LGBTQ rights are certainly not mirrored by the political right in other countries. Both in tone and substance he has avoided the populism that the hard right around the world uses.”
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© Dominic Moore, 2023
