GREEKS ARE SET to go to the polls tomorrow and despite recent scandals, the incumbent New Democracy party looks likely to win the largest share of the vote, but with a coalition deal an improbability, a second election later this summer could well be on the cards.
According to polling data, the conservative New Democracy party, led by Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, has a roughly 7% lead over its nearest rival, the leftist Syriza party led by former prime minister Alexis Tsipras.
Some of the issues that have shaped the campaign include the country’s economic recovery from the debt crisis that engulfed it for over a decade, inflation, access to housing and migration policy.
The opposition has also been keen to criticise high-profile controversies that have occurred during Mitsotakis’ time in government.
Specifically, the wiretapping of journalists as well as the leader of the social-democratic PASOK party, Niko Androukalis, and the handling of a catastrophic head-on train collision earlier this year that left 57 people dead.
The crash and its aftermath led to public outrage with tens of thousands of people taking to the streets in protest.
After a slump in the government’s popularity, that anger seems to have abated to some degree as the election comes into view and economic concerns have come to the fore once again.
The near collapse of the country’s economy is still fresh in the minds of Greek voters.
“We don’t have the imminent threat and risk of economic collapse, an economic crisis, which is something good. On the other hand, of course, the impact of the crisis is still there and the recovery from the crisis is not something which is totally sustainable,” says Othon Anastasakis, director South East European studies at Oxford University.
“So there are always fears,” he says, “as to whether political uncertainty might also be conducive to economic vulnerability and that’s an issue that is being raised mostly by economic analysts.
“Overall, the message certainly that New Democracy wants to give is that this is the party that is much more reliable in terms of its economic performance and economic prospects.
“And that is probably the strongest card that New Democracy and Mitsotakis are throwing in this electoral battle.”
Given this, the focal points for criticism from opposition parties have shifted to areas outside of the country’s economic performance, according to Anastasakis.
“That’s why the whole debate diverted towards issues or has to do with governance and corruption and the wiretapping scandal,” he says.
He describes it as a “very negative thing for New Democracy and some thing that Syriza has been using a lot.”
“The other is of course the train disaster and that is also something that shows how the government wasn’t able to modernise a train line, which is basically, you know, the most important one.
“And that shows the limits and the problems first of all, with how privatisation has been developing and also how the whole system operates, the inefficiencies of the system.”
All in all, there are 27 political parties, 8 alliances and one independent candidate vying for the public’s votes on Sunday, but based on polling and the current make-up of parliament, the majority of those votes look set to go in the direction of the three major parties, New Democracy (36%), Syriza (29%) and PASOK (10%).
Other less popular but notable players include the Communist Party, which is polling at around 7%, the European Realistic Disobedience Front, led by former finance minister Yannis Varoufakis (4%), and the nationalist far-right Greek Solution party (4%).
New Democracy’s main platform for re-election is the maintenance of Greece’s economic recovery following the national debt crisis that resulted from the global financial collapse of 2008.
Mitsotakis has also touted his government’s efforts to repel migration to Greek Islands and at the boarder it shares with its neighbour Turkey.
The ruling conservative party has been in power since 2019 and has been rocked by scandals on more than one occasion.
The most notable of these were the use of state intelligence forces to conduct surveillance on journalists as well as the leader of the PASOK party, Nikos Androulakis, and the government’s response to the fatal train crash earlier this year, which Mitsotakis initially blamed on human error before walking that statement back in the face of public outrage.
The government has remained ahead of the other major parties in opinion polls throughout its term despite its controversies.
Founded in 1974, New Democracy has traditionally represented the centre-right in Greek parliamentary politics.
Mitsotakis, a former consultant at McKinsey, comes from a political dynasty that dates back to the late 19th century.
His father Constantine Mitsotakis was also prime minister three decades ago. His sister is a former minister and was the first woman mayor of Athens. The current Athens Mayor is her son and Mitsotakis’ nephew.
His image as a member of the elite is one the incumbent prime minister has long struggled to shake off but the other major parties have their own reputational problems to deal with, too.
The youngest of the three main parties contesting this weekend’s election is Syriza, a coalition of left-wing parties formed in 2004 and officially registered in 2012.
Syriza is currently the second largest party in Greece’s parliament and is led by former prime minister Alexis Tsipras, who held the office during Greece’s tumultuous debt crisis which reached a head in 2015, during which his government found itself in a standoff with the European troika over bailout conditions.
Eventually, Tsipras relented and accepted the bailout.
That reversal led to a rift in the leadership of the party, most notably with the resignation of prominent finance minister Yannis Varoufakis. Since then Syriza has been seen as moving closer to the political centre and away from its radical roots.
“This is what I believe is the biggest problem (for Syriza),” says Anastasakis. “This is a party that is still very much well weighed down by their far-leftist background.
“It is at the same time, the party of opposition and resistance to authority coming from left wing politics, so there is that type of side. Then on the other hand, it is also forced to have the role of the alternative party in power, and I think those two roles are very, very difficult to marry.”
This, he says, has left much of the public unconvinced of Syriza’s ability to perform in the role of government.
“That’s why in spite of the fact that there are those two major things that have happened, it hasn’t managed to convincingly addressed, you know, an electoral discourse, that can be a real and credible alternative to New Democracy.”
Syriza and its leader are asking for another chance in government, this time without the straightjacket imposed austerity.
“Enough is enough,” the 48-year-old told a rally in Larissa, central Greece last week.
“Enough with profiteering, inequality, nepotism, indifference, arrogance, injustice,” he said, accusing Mitsotakis of showering billions of euros on political and family allies.
While it may have originally been founded as a socialist party, PASOK is seen as the party of the centre-left in Greek politics and until the emergence of Syriza, was New Democracy’s main rival.
Also founded in 1974 after the collapse of Greece’s military dictatorship, PASOK was the most popular party on the Greek left until 2012, when in government it negotiated the first bailout from the European troika.
The terms of that bailout also included enforcing harsh austerity measures and led to a significant loss of popularity for the party.
Having been the largest party in the Hellenic Parliament in 2009 with 160 seats, its support plummeted in the 2015 election which left PASOK with just 13 seats.
In 2017, PASOK merged with other social-democratic parties to take its current form as a centre-left political alliance. The membership of that alliance has changed over the years since with some parties leaving the movement.
The party is led by Nikos Androulakis, who had been seen by analysts as a potential coalition partner for Mitsotakis after his election as party chairman in 2021.
Earlier this month Greece’s Supreme Court banned a party founded by a jailed member of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn group from contesting this weekend’s general election.
The far-right Hellenes party of Ilias Kasidiaris, a convicted leader of the now disbanded Golden Dawn, will not be able to field candidates, the court’s assembly ruled.
The small nationalist party Hellenes was formed in 2020 by Kasidiaris, the former spokesman and lawmaker of Golden Dawn, a few months before he was sent to prison.
He was among several top Golden Dawn members handed heavy prison sentences in October 2020 by a court that labelled the neo-Nazi party a criminal organisation.
Kasidiaris was among nearly 60 Golden Dawn members convicted in 2020 of the murder of anti-fascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas and other crimes including murder, assault and running a criminal organisation.
While polling may indicate a win for New Democracy, there are a few things that make this political contest one to watch.
A number of novel factors are at play in tomorrow’s vote, including a swathe of new young voters, the banning of neo-Nazi candidates and a new electoral system which will see the outcome determined by proportional representation for the first time.
Around 440,000 young people will have the chance to vote for the first time this weekend and courting those newcomers has been a feature of the campaign.
Thanks to legislation introduced while Syriza was in power, those turning 17 this year are eligible to vote in the national election.
Young voters have traditionally supported parties on the left and Syriza in particular will be hoping to receive a boost from this new contingent of the electorate.
Despite politicians’ repeated calls and social media stunts, however, young voters are not expected to turn out massively on Sunday as only one in four people aged 17-24 voted in the last election in 2019.
Greece is the country with the second highest level of youth unemployment in the European Union, with 24.2% of people under 25 jobless, according to the latest available data from EU statistics agency Eurostat.
This weekend will see a new proportional representation system determine the outcome of at least the initial election result, although due to the historical lack of coalition government in Greece, as well as diminishing prospects of coalition between the major parties, a re-run without the new system looks likely to be the ultimate decider.
Traditionally, Greek elections have been a contest for 250 of the Hellenic Parliament’s 300 seats. In previous elections, the winning party would receive the remaining seats as a bonus. This meant that strong, single party governments were more common than coalition ones.
But while Syriza was in government, they introduced new legislation changing the system to proportional representation, which the New Democracy government has since changed back to the old system as of the election following this one.
So, if no deal to form a government is reached following Sunday’s result, another vote will take place during the summer under the rules of the old system.
“There’s going to be a second vote. There’s no doubt about it,” says Anastasakis.
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