Greece eyes new vote as PM seeks absolute majority
Athens, Greece - Greece’s Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said on Monday he was seeking a new vote as soon as on June 25 in order to obtain a ruling majority, a day after his party won national elections that failed to produce a singleparty government.
The conservative New Democracy party of Mitsotakis trounced its rivals in Sunday’s vote, with a 20-point lead over its nearest contender - Syriza, led by leftist Alexis Tsipras.
Voters handed the conservatives their best result since 2007, crediting the party with bringing economic stability back to a nation once known as an EU laggard. ‘Shock and awe’, headlined left-wing daily Efsyn on Monday, summing up the feeling shared by both New Democracy and Syriza voters, while pro-government Proto Thema noted that the double-digit margin was the widest seen since 1974.
The ‘political earthquake’ hailed by Mitsotakis sent the Athens stock market to its highest in almost a decade.
But the win fell five seats short of an outright majority, leaving Mitsotakis with the option of either seeking a coalition or calling a new vote.
The 55-year-old Harvard graduate on Monday declined power sharing, telling President Katerina Sakallaropoulou, who handed him the mandate to form a government, that it was not possible to form a coalition under the current parliamentary lineup. Greece should head for new elections ‘as soon as possible’, he said.
Following Mitsotakis’ rejection, Greece will continue going through the motions required under the constitution - with the president then handing similar mandates to Syriza and then third-placed socialist party Pasok-kinal.
The bids are also doomed to failure, given Sunday’s result.
Hours after the vote, Tsipras, too, had set the stage for a new vote, saying the next battle will be ‘critical and final’.
A senior judge will eventually be named interim prime minister and call for new elections.
In power over the last four years, former Mckinsey consultant Mitsotakis steered the country through the pandemic which devastated Greece’s vital tourism industry.
On his watch, the erstwhile EU economic headache has enjoyed a POST-COVID revival, booking growth of 5.9 per cent in 2022.
With unemployment and inflation falling, and growth this year projected at twice that of the European Union average, Greece’s outlook was a far cry from the throes of the crippling debt crisis a decade ago.
Mitsotakis’ term however was blighted by a wiretapping scandal as well as a train crash that claimed 57 lives in February.
The government initially blamed the accident - Greece’s worst-ever rail disaster - on human error, even though the country’s notoriously poor rail network has suffered from years of under-investment.
Nevertheless, neither the accident nor the wiretapping scandal appeared to have dented support for his conservatives - who scored a far bigger win than that predicted by opinion polls ahead of the vote.