Conservative party wins in Greece
Leftist prime minister concedes defeat to opposition leader
ATHENS, Greece — Greek conservative opposition leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis comfortably won a parliamentary election Sunday as voters rejected Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras after a tumultuous four years of the country struggling through a crippling financial crisis.
With 95% of votes counted, Mitsotakis’ New Democracy party had 39.8% of the vote compared with Tsipras’ leftwing Syriza party at 31.5%.
“I asked for a strong mandate to change Greece. You offered it generously,” Mitsotakis said in his victory speech. “From today, a difficult but beautiful fight begins.”
Mitsotakis, 51, vowed to abide by his campaign pledges to cut taxes, attract investment and improve the job market. He had been ahead in opinion polls for three years and managed to build a sizable lead.
“Greeks deserve better, and the time has come for us to prove it,” he said.
Tsipras conceded defeat and said he phoned Mitsotakis to congratulate him.
“The citizens have made their choice. We fully respect the popular vote,” Tsipras said in a speech from central Athens.
He said his party would work to protect the rights of working Greeks as “a responsible but dynamic opposition” to the government.
Golden Dawn lost all 18 of its seats in the 300-member parliament. It was a dramatic decline for a party that had become the third-largest in the Greek legislature during the country’s financial crisis, winning 9.39% of the vote in 2014.
Party leader Nikos Mihaloliakos vowed in his concession speech that “the fight for nationalism continues.”
“We are sending a message to our enemies and so-called friends: Golden Dawn is not finished; get over it,” he said.
Mihaloliakos ended his speech with his customary “Hail victory!” — a direct translation of the Nazis’ “Sieg heil!”
Sunday’s national election was the first held since Greece emerged from three international bailouts that were dependent on successive governments implementing strict austerity measures, including major tax increases and spending cuts.
The financial crisis saw unemployment and poverty levels skyrocket and the economy shrink by a quarter.
Mitsotakis, the son of a former prime minister, brother of a former foreign minister and uncle to a newly elected mayor of Athens, fought during the campaign to shed the image of family privilege.
He pledged to make Greece more business-friendly, to attract foreign investment, to modernize the country’s notorious bureaucracy and to cut taxes.
Tsipras, 44, called the election three months ahead of schedule after Syriza suffered a severe defeat in European Union and local elections in May and early June.
He had led his small Coalition of the Radical Left, or Syriza, party to power in 2015 on promises to repeal the austerity of Greece’s first two bailouts.
But after months of tumultuous negotiations with international creditors that saw Greece nearly crash out of the European Union’s joint currency, he was forced to change tack, agreeing to a third bailout and imposing the accompanying spending cuts and higher taxes.