On Sunday night, the Greek prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, triumphantly described his country’s general election result as an “earthquake”. After a remarkable victory, this piece of political hyperbole seemed almost justified.
Prior to the weekend, no ruling party had increased its vote share in Greece for more than 40 years. It had been predicted that a state wiretapping scandal, and the background to a catastrophic rail accident in February, could damage Mr Mitsotakis’s prospects. Yet polls predicting a relatively close race proved wildly out, as the centre-right New Democracy party gained more than double the votes of its leftwing rival, Syriza. Having fractionally failed to win an absolute majority, Mr Mitsotakis may now trigger a second election – to be held under a different proportional system – which would be likely to hand him a handsome mandate.
Mr Mitsotakis won big partly because of signs of economic progress, and partly because voters scarred by the eurozone debt crisis sought stability and continuity. The government was able to point to a variety of reassuring indicators. Foreign direct investment rose last year by 50%. The Greek economy, albeit from a very low base, is currently growing at twice the eurozone average. After three bailouts totalling €280bn, international supervision of spending controls by lenders was finally ended last summer. Mr Mitsotakis’s small state, tax-cutting platform was also combined with ruthlessly populist policies on migration, including a Trumpian pledge to extend a steel border fence along almost the entire length of Greece’s border with Turkey.
Viewed from the left, however, this was as much an election lost as an election won. It may come to be seen as the grim finale to a political cycle that began in 2015, when Syriza’s leader, Aléxis Tsípras, won a mandate to resist crushing austerity measures demanded by Brussels, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The circumstances of Mr Tsípras’s subsequent U-turn – under extreme political duress as Greece teetered on the brink of leaving the euro – has subsequently fractured the left and undermined its credibility.
Having enacted sweeping austerity measures between 2015 and 2019, Mr Tsípras campaigned this time round on calls for greater welfare spending and public investment. It didn’t wash. A high abstention rate, and Syriza’s plummeting share of the vote, pointed to a loss of faith in Greece’s main progressive party and its leader. The re-emergence of Pasok, the centre-left party eclipsed by Syriza at the time of the eurozone crisis, may point to a future realignment. Mr Tsípras’s political future looks uncertain after what amounted to a humiliation.
For the sake of millions of households living close to the edge, Greece’s opposition parties need to quickly regroup and find common ground. Mr Mitsotakis’s market-friendly reforms may have delighted banks and investors, and reassured the comfortable middle classes. But the less well-off continue to suffer the dire consequences of punitive and sustained austerity. The Greek economy remains about a fifth smaller than it was before 2008. Levels of poverty and social exclusion are among the highest in Europe. Financial stability and the paying down of debt to international creditors has been achieved at the expense of general living standards. Mr Mitsotakis will deliver more of the same and the markets will cheer him for it. After a dismal night, progressive forces need to find a way back into the conversation.
