Riding high on an election victory few expected, Greece’s prime minister has said he will push for a repeat poll “as soon as possible” after a landslide win that left the centre-right leader short of a parliamentary majority under a new voting system.
Hours after his New Democracy party clinched almost 41% of the vote – 20 percentage points ahead of its main rival, the leftwing Syriza, Kyriakos Mitsotakis said he would not waste time trying to form a coalition government.
“I believe the message of the ballot is very clear,” he told the country’s president, Katerina Sakellaropoulou, adding it was impossible to form a new government under the current parliament. “I intend to return the exploratory mandate this afternoon. We will proceed to elections as soon as possible.”
A follow-up poll could be held on 25 June, a week earlier than originally envisaged, he said.
As head of state, Sakellaropoulou had been due to hand Mitsotakis a three-day mandate to explore whether he could forge a governing alliance in the Greek parliament.
Under a new electoral system of proportional representation, New Democracy fell five seats short of a majority in Athens’ 300-seat house despite an extraordinary victory in which the party not only routed its opponent but exceeded its landslide result in 2019, when Mitsotakis ousted the Syriza leader, Alexis Tsipras. The leftwing party, by contrast, won just over 20%, posting what Tsipras would quickly describe as “an extremely negative result”.
Under Greece’s constitution, the president must pass the mandate to the second and third parties – Syriza and the centre-left Pasok – if the winning party fails to form a government. But with Pasok ruling out an alliance and Syriza confronting almost impossible parliamentary arithmetic, the prospect of all three mandates being returned to Sakellaropoulou was being viewed as a foregone conclusion.
Once the mandates run their course it is incumbent on the president to appoint a caretaker administration until elections are held.
Before Sunday’s vote, Mitsotakis, 55, had repeatedly urged Greeks to give him the mandate that would allow him to form a single-party government that could implement an ambitious reform programme. The next ballot, crucially, will take place under an electoral system of reinforced representation that will grant the winning party as many as 50 bonus seats.
It had been thought that the governing party’s popularity had been severely dented by a wiretapping scandal and a devastating train crash – events that cast a pall over Mitsotakis, a former banker, personally.
But Syriza’s unexpectedly poor performance appeared to uphold the view that Greeks had voted for stability – despite many being perturbed by what has been perceived as democratic backsliding under the centre-right government with the spy scandal highlighting those concerns.
In an election dominated by anxiety over the cost of living crisis, Greeks singled out the economy, citing memories of the country’s debt drama a decade ago and the punishing austerity meted out in return for emergency funds to keep the country afloat.
Sunday’s ballot was the first since the EU and International Monetary Fund, which orchestrated the biggest bailout in global financial history to avert a Greek default, ceased supervising the country’s finances.
Tsipras was previously catapulted into power on the back of widespread anger over austerity, transforming his party from a fringe group capable of picking up about 4% of the vote to a political force to be reckoned with.
Hours after his devastating defeat on Sunday party officials said the 48-year-old would lead the party to elections in June but would immediately press ahead with “a change of strategy”. But there was also a sense that Tsipras’s days at the helm of Syriza could also be numbered if June’s electoral result is as disastrous.
In a televised address after convening his executive committee, Tsipras said the forthcoming poll was an opportunity to “reverse the prospect of an uncontrollable ruling prime minister”, saying Syriza was not only “here to stay” but the role of the left in the country’s political life was also at stake.
“I have learned in difficult moments to assume responsibility and not to abandon the fight,” he said. “I am here and I am not going to abandon the battle in the middle, no less, of a difficult fight. Yesterday was election day; today is the first day of the fight for the next elections.”
