Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has called for new elections "possibly on June 25", a day after his conservative New Democracy party fell short of winning an absolute majority.
Mitsotakis’s centre-right New Democracy party won 40.8 percent of the vote versus a disappointing 20 percent for centre-left Syriza led by Alexis Tsipras.
The prime minister described the victory as a “political earthquake” and said the result showed that Greeks had given his party a mandate for a four-year government.
The size of the win came as a surprise – Mitsotakis’s administration has been dogged by a wiretapping scandal, the Covid pandemic, a cost of living crisis and a deadly rail crash in February which triggered public outrage.
But under a new voting system based on proportional representation, New Democracy is five seats short of the 151 required to form a majority.
A surprisingly wide win for Mitsotakis' ND party in #Greece elections.
— Yannis Koutsomitis (@YanniKouts) May 21, 2023
• Disastreous result for Syriza, big trouble for Tsipras
• PASOK doing well
Official results, in 30.7% of polls:
• ND 41.1%
• Syriza 20.1%
• PASOK 12.7%
• KKE 6.7%
• Ellinikí Lysi 4.5%
🗳 #εκλογες2023… pic.twitter.com/Lvxn5DtIWB
'No possibility' of forming coalition
"We will head for new elections... as soon as possible," Mitsotakis told President Katerina Sakellaropoulou, adding that there was no possibility of forming a new government under the current parliament.
Sakellaropoulou was due to hand Mitsotakis an official mandate to try to form a coalition government after failing to win an absolute majority.
He is invited to lead negotiations with other parties to try to form a coalition.
If that fails, she will pass it to the second and third parties – Syriza and then socialist PASOK.
Failing that, she will appoint a caretaker government until a new vote about a month later.
This appears to be Mitsotakis's preferred option.
In his victory speech on Sunday, he said that people gave him the mandate to “rule strong and autonomous”.
A second ballot in June allows the winning party to pick up bonus seats to be able to govern alone.
“The people wanted the choice of a Greece run by a majority government and by New Democracy without the help of others," he said.
6 percent growth
The centre-right has governed Greece for the past four years and growth was close to 6 percent last year.
Sunday’s election was Greece’s first since its economy stopped being strictly supervised by international lenders who had provided bailout funds during the country’s nearly decade-long financial crisis.
The result was a major blow for Syriza’s leader Alexis Tsipras, who came to power in 2015 campaigning against the austerity measures imposed by international bailouts, but ended up agreeing to creditors' demands.
