If voters handed the prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s conservative New Democracy party a thumping 20-point win and its best result since 2007 on Sunday, it was at least partly because they credited him with steering Greece to economic safety.
Three mammoth bailouts totalling €280bn averted disaster during a decade-long crisis that reached its peak in 2015, and Greece only emerged from a draconian regime of spending controls ordered by its international lenders last summer.
The human cost was immense. Unemployment peaked at 27.5% – and at 58% for the under-25s – as Greece’s economy shrank by 25% in what economists now agree was a downturn that hit the country as hard as the Great Depression of the 1930s hit the US.
In the five years from 2008 to 2013, Greeks became on average 40% poorer, according to data from the country’s statistical agency analysed by Reuters. By 2014, disposable household income in Greece had sunk below 2003 levels.
With unemployment soaring, many households became reliant on the pensions of older family members to survive – but repeated cuts left 45% of pensioners receiving monthly payments below the poverty line of €665 by 2015.
That year, one in five Greeks were assessed as experiencing severe material deprivation, more than double the 2008 figure, and almost 4 million people – more than a third of the population – as being “at risk of poverty or social exclusion”.
An estimated 800,000 Greeks had no access to medical treatment after losing their health insurance through unemployment during the crisis. Cases of severe depression almost trebled and, according to a study in the British Medical Journal, the suicide rate rose by 35%.
Greece also suffered a devastating brain drain. The population declined by 400,000 between 2010 and 2015, with a 2013 study finding more than 120,000 professionals – including doctors, engineers and scientists – had left since 2010.
A subsequent study found that of all those who fled the country, about 90% had a first degree, more than 60% a master’s degree, and 11% a PhD.
In his first four-year term, Mitsotakis – a 55-year-old Harvard-educated former banker – oversaw unexpectedly high growth, a steep fall in unemployment and a country on course to regain its investment-grade credit rating after years of “junk” status.
Greece’s GDP has now more or less returned to where it was when it first defaulted in 2010. Unemployment has more than halved from its peak, and taxes have gone down – and pensions and the minimum wage up – for the first time since the crisis began.
The conservatives say they have overseen the country’s largest infrastructure programme since 1975, with more than 2,300 projects under way across the country, including motorways, airports, ports and marinas.
Things are still far from perfect. The severe recession and years of emergency borrowing left Greece with a huge national debt – it reached €400bn last December – and hit household incomes so hard they could take another decade to recover.
Crippling austerity – tax rises, public sector wage controls, pension cuts – left many exhausted and sunk into private debt, low wages and job insecurity; last year, almost half of all Greek households could barely get by on their monthly income.
But even if Europe’s cost of living crisis is biting harder in Greece than elsewhere, the country is still a long way from where it was a decade ago, when despair turned into riots on the streets – and for that, voters appear to have thanked Mitsotakis.
