"Whoever loses, is out"? What you need to know about the Greek elections

The vote on May 21 is likely to be a neck-and-neck race – the most important information about the 2023 Greek election.

• Elections in Greece 2023: The candidates
• Greek election 2023: The polls
• Election in Greece 2023: The issues in the election campaign

Munich – In the parliamentary elections in Greece, three candidates are in the spotlight – even if none of them will probably be able to achieve their own government majority. Observers are therefore already expecting a new election. Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, however, has not yet lost an election to his challenger Alexis Tsipras and has already beaten him three times – at national, local and European level. At the beginning of May, he mockingly compared the parliamentary election to a basketball game in the United States: "If you lose, you're out."

Greek elections 2023: Mitsotakis, Tsipras and Androulakis

Kyriakos Mitsotakis: The current Greek prime minister is campaigning on the economic growth of the past four years and a solid foreign policy with two important alliances with the US and France. "We now have much more experience to tackle the changes that will make Greece a modern European state," he said in a television interview in May.

Kyriakos Mitsotakis © Aris Messinis/AFP

According to him, the country must currently be led with a "strong hand" in view of the Ukraine war and other challenges. If his party, of which he has been leader since 2016, is not re-elected, Greece's economic recovery would be at risk. Mitsotakis comes from a family of politicians and tries to shake off his elitist image in his dealings with voters.

Alexis Tsipras: Tsipras was head of government from 2015 to 2019, when Greece went through a severe debt and financial crisis. He now wants to get a second chance to show what his party can achieve if government spending is not capped by the EU and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

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Alexis Tsipras at a campaign event in Thessaloniki © Achilleas Chiras/Imago

Since 2010, the EU and the IMF have saved Greece from bankruptcy three times, albeit with strict austerity measures. Since then, his party has moved further into the political center. Tsipras was the first openly atheist prime minister in religious Greece and the youngest in a hundred years. He entered politics at the age of 16, when he organized school protests against Mitsotakis' father's education policies. He quickly rose through the ranks of his party because they were looking for a new face for the 2006 mayoral election in Athens. Two years later, he became party leader.

Nikos Androulakis: Androulakis was already being touted as a possible coalition partner for Mitsotakis immediately after his election as party leader in 2021. But then it became known that Androulakis' phone was being monitored by intelligence. Since then, he has been calling for an investigation into the wiretapping affair.

Nikos Androulakis © Sakis Mitrodilis/AFP

Androulakis is a civil engineer and was already involved in the PASOK party youth. He sat in the European Parliament for two terms, but has not yet sat in the parliament in Athens. In March, he stunned the public by remarking that he would only enter a government led by neither Mitsotakis nor Tsipras.

Greek election 2023: The polls

Although Mitsotakis is clearly ahead in the polls, no clear majority is expected. Most recently, one in ten eligible voters was still undecided. In polls, Mitsotakis' New Democracy party has won up to 33.6 percent of the vote, while Tsipras's Syriza has won up to 26.9 percent.

Electoral system in Greece

In Greece, proportional representation still applies. 280 of the 300 deputies will be elected after him, and 20 will go to the party with the most votes. In order to enter parliament, the parties must receive at least three percent of the votes.

Pollsters assume, however, that this time the top candidate could need 46 percent of the vote to finally win. If no party succeeds in doing so, the vote is likely to lead to a deadlock in parliament. First, because no party seems to be able to secure a majority.

Secondly, because the three leading parties have already declared that they do not want to work together. If it is not possible to form a coalition government, this would mean that new elections would be held at the beginning of July. Then a new electoral law would take effect, which would give the winner of the election additional seats.

Greek elections 2023: the campaign themes

In the election campaign, Mitsotakis is campaigning for tax cuts, a revival of tourism after Corona and continuous growth of six percent in 2022. His party promises to raise the minimum wage to 1000,<> euros, fight unemployment and invest in Greece's health system.

Tsipras promises to restore confidence in the state, which was shaken by a wiretapping scandal at the Greek secret service and the serious train accident in February. "Mitsotakis doesn't care about the average citizen, only about the powerful," Tsipras said during the election campaign.

Tsipras wants to increase the education budget, raise the salaries of civil servants and health workers, and fight inflation, for which he blames "cartels" in the country. "Greece has Bulgarian wages and British prices," he said last week. He accuses Mitsotakis of squandering billions of euros on political allies and his family. (AFP/dpa/frs)