The centre-right triumphs in Greece, but a new government will require new elections

The victory of outgoing prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and his centre-right Nea Dimokratia party was overwhelming. But to get a stable government over the next five years, Greece will have to go to the polls again. That’s what emerges from the still tentative results of this weekend’s national elections. And who has seen the centre-right increase consensus beyond previous estimates? The left is bad, Syriza stands at around 20%.

For former prime minister Alexis Tsipras, the defeat is clear: “The struggles have both victories and defeats”, he declared after the debut polls. The Syriza secretary had hoped for a much better outcome in trying to form a centre-left coalition with Pasok’s socialists, who held an 11 percent stake, and perhaps a deal with former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, whose party did not take risks. enters parliament. Plans that no longer seem achievable, even under the default hypothesis of the Encore vote.

Mitsotakis can start preparations for the second term. “We will run faster for better wages, jobs, a better healthcare system, a stronger Greece,” he said after the initial results. Next June, what Mitsokatis himself wanted was for those with the most votes to get the majority bonus in Parliament and thus to “blackmail the other parties”, the prime minister announced.

The conservative leader, who was elected for the first time in 2019, has managed to keep his approval ratings high in four years of his government, even after the telephone tapping scandal of politicians and journalists and the Tebi train tragedy that broke out last summer. February, when 57 people lost their lives. A Harvard graduate with a background as an economic analyst at Chase Bank in London, 55-year-old Mitsotakis belongs to a long-standing Greek political dynasty: His father was the prime minister, and his nephew was the current mayor of Athens.

During the election campaign, Mitsotakis presented himself as the reassuring face that emerged from the country’s painful debt crisis: last year, Greece exited the European Union’s economic surveillance program and recorded a growth of 5.9%. Nea Dimokratia’s “Are we going backwards or forwards?”, a reference to the previous Tsipras government elected in 2015 amid the debt crisis. The election slogan seems to have resonated with the voters.

Source: Today IT

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