New PM for Greece

Conservatives win by landslide, promise end to ‘painful cycle’

GREECE’S conservative prime minister-elect Kyriakos Mitsotakis vowed the country would “proudly” enter a postbailout period of “jobs, security and growth” after winning a landslide victory in Sunday’s general election.

Official results showed Mr Mitsotakis on track to crush leftist premier Alexis Tsipras, who oversaw austerity measures after Greece’s dramatic rescue by international creditors in the European debt crisis.

“A painful cycle has closed,” Mr Mitsotakis said in a televised address, adding that Greece would “proudly raise its head again” on his watch.

With official results from 94 per cent of polling stations, New Democracy scored a crushing victory by nearly 40 per cent – its best score in over a decade – to 31.5 per cent for Mr Tsipras’s Syriza party.

“I want to see this people prosper. I want to see the children who left to return,” Mr Mitsotakis later told party supporters.

Mr Tsipras had earlier admitted defeat after over four years in power that saw Greece emerge from its third bailout.

The 44-year-old warned that his Syriza party would “dynamically” resist efforts to scale back the party’s pro-labour reforms.

If the results are confirmed, Mr Mitsotakis – a 51-year-old Harvard graduate and former McKinsey consultant – will have a majority of 158 lawmakers in the 300-seat parliament. Mr Tsipras’s party will have 86 seats.

Meanwhile, Golden Dawn, the far-right, anti-immigrant party that had shocked Greek politics by evolving from a marginal, violent neo-Nazi group into Greece’s third-largest party during the country’s economic crisis, was knocked out of parliament in Sunday’s national election.

With nearly 95 per cent of precincts reporting, Golden Dawn had 2.95 per cent of the votes, just under the 3 per cent threshold needed to be represented in parliament.