Conservative Mitsotakis clearly wins Greek elections, but no majority to govern

The Prime Minister of Greece, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, of the conservative formation New Democracy, has won in the general elections of this Sunday in Greece with 40.81% of the votes, with more than 75% of the ballots counted. That percentage does not allow him to govern alone, but it is a much wider margin over the second party than the polls and exit polls predicted. The left of Syriza, the main opposition party, led by Alexis Tsipras, has taken a beating. The formation came in second, but only with 20.07% of the votes; the Socialists of Pasok, on the other hand, gained strength and achieved 11.75% of the votes. The communists of the KKE reached 7.12%, and the ultranationalists of the Greek Solution 4.49%.

The participation was 59.69%, higher than the 57.78% reached in the 2019 elections. Although voting is compulsory in Greece, those who abstain are not punished.

With these results, pending the end of the scrutiny, the president of Greece, Katerina Sakellaropoulou, will instruct from this Monday the most voted party to form a government, as contemplated by the Constitution. If within 72 hours it does not achieve sufficient support, the responsibility will pass to the second party with the most votes, which will have the same period. And if it fails, the third party will be given the opportunity. After three failed attempts, Greeks will be called to vote again within a minimum period of 40 days, starting this Sunday.

These elections would not strictly be a "second round", but new elections. And they will govern the third electoral system approved in the last eight years. In 2015, Syriza won the elections with a system that distributed 150 seats proportionally and reserved another 50 for the most voted list. The following year, in 2016, Syriza passed a law awarding seats proportionally, in order to avoid absolute majorities and encourage pacts and coalitions. That is the rule that has been applied this Sunday. New Democracy won the 2019 elections with this system, even though it is difficult to obtain an absolute majority. And he reformed it in 2020, but the changes do not take effect once the legislature in which they are approved ends. In the next elections, scheduled for this summer, the first list will enjoy the prize of the "reinforced proportional" system, which plans to grant 20 extra seats from 25% of the votes and up to 50 if it exceeds 40%.

Retiree Margalidis Trapalis, 67, who voted at school 151 in the Athens neighborhood of Metaxourgeio, didn't mess his head too much with the percentages. He was convinced that the prime minister would be re-elected. "With him he has improved defense and the economy, the most important thing," he said. In another school in the same neighborhood, Tasoula Panagiota, also a pensioner, 65, voted in the same direction, sure that the result of a second term will allow the prime minister to conclude his work of "modernization of the country". That has been the central argument of the conservative campaign: Mitsotakis needs more time for the economy to keep improving.

The leader of the leftist Syriza party, Alexis Tsipras, at a polling station in Athens, Sunday, May 21, 2023.ELIAS MARCOU (REUTERS)

The conservatives have managed to overcome the worst crisis of their government, which occurred with the train accident, where 57 people lost their lives on February 28, in Tempe. That day was followed by two weeks of mass protests against the deterioration of public services and the largest general strike in a decade. Transport Minister Kostas A. Karamanlis resigned in the first 24 hours and in the same week the prime minister apologized to the families of the victims, although he maintained that the cause of the accident was the human error of the head of the nearest station.

Before the accident, the government had announced that it intended to call elections for 9 April. However, after the tragedy he decided to rush the legal deadlines and convene them almost three months after the catastrophe. Karamanlis, the former Minister of Transport, has been re-elected deputy in the elections this Sunday.

Nor have voters punished Mitsotakis for his second major political crisis, the wiretapping scandal. This case of espionage was uncovered in June 2021 when the leader of Pasok, Nikos Andrulakis, denounced an attempt to tap his phone. That revelation gave way to other cases of espionage by the secret services on journalists, politicians, high-ranking military officers and even Mitsotakis' ministers. Greece is a country accustomed to the authorities using secret services for partisan purposes. In 1994, Constantinos Mitsotakis, the then president and father of the current prime minister, was tried for having been the "moral instigator" of illegal wiretapping against his political opponents between 1988 and 1990. Socialist Andreas Papandreou, the most often formed prime minister in modern Greece, was also tried in a similar case in 1989. Neither was convicted.

The government overcame the train and wiretapping crises and focused its campaign on the economy. All Greeks remember that the country declared bankruptcy in 2008, following market pressure on its public debt. The so-called troika, made up of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, imposed harsh austerity measures in exchange for the granting of loans. In 2019, the then president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, regretted having given "too much importance" then to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and admitted to having applied "thoughtless austerity". "We have been insufficiently supportive of Greece, we have insulted Greece," he said. The country was supervised by the financial authorities of the EU, until in August 2022 the period of "reinforced surveillance" of the accounts ended with the departure of the so-called men in black, colloquial name with which the inspectors of the troika were known.

Now, Mitsotakis praised the end of the tutelage by the EU, its management during the covid-19 pandemic and that of the energy crisis, derived from the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The unemployment rate, at 10.9%, is the lowest in recent decades. The opposition, during the campaign, stressed the cost of living and recalled that external debt continues to account for 171% of GDP, the fourth largest in the world, surpassed in percentage only by those of Japan, Sudan and Eritrea.

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