Greek conservatives clear an ‘open road’ to political supremacy

Athens, Greece – Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis says he will not try to form a government after his party wins the general election by a huge margin.

“I do not believe there is any basis for forming a government in this parliament,” the leader of the conservative New Democracy party told President Katerina Skellaropoulou on Monday after she instructed him to do so.

Mitsotakis expects to be in an even better position after a second vote, which could take place as early as next month.

In Sunday’s election, New Democracy finished first with 40.8 percent of the vote, one percentage point higher than in previous national polls four years earlier and about 20 points ahead of second-placed party, left-wing Syriza.

Voting took place under a system of proportional representation, legislated by Syriza before it fell from power in 2019.

Under that system, Mitsotakis’ ruling party lost five seats short of the 151 seats in the 300-seat legislative chamber needed to rule again.

New Democracy has passed a new electoral law that returns seat bonuses to the winning party. But according to the constitution, changes to the electoral law cannot take effect until the second election after the law change, so no party can abuse the system to stay in power indefinitely.

“If yesterday the electoral system that will apply in the next election were in place, New Democracy would have a strong majority of more than 170 seats, so I feel it is my duty to help us overcome the hurdle, so it appears that. are, of proportional representation,” said Mitsotakis.

He said he would return the order to form a government to Sakellaropoulou within a day.

Procedurally, she then has to ask Syriza, which won 20 percent of the vote, to form a government and finally the socialist PASOK-Movement for Change (PASOK-KINAL), which got 11.5 percent.

If these parties exhaust the three-day chance to form a government, the second round would take place as early as June 25.

It is a sign of Mitsotakis’ confidence that he decided to pass up the opportunity to form a coalition government, preferring to discredit proportional representation, a cause célèbre from the left.

On Sunday night, he hailed New Democracy’s resounding victory as a “political earthquake” and said the election result “exceeded even our expectations.”

Polls had predicted New Democracy to win 32 to 35 percent of the vote, and even a joint exit poll gave the centre-right party no more than 10 points ahead of Syriza. The result suggests that New Democracy will handily win the rematch.

“New Democracy has managed to convince people that they are efficient and effective, and [left-wing leader Alexis] Tsipras and Syriza did not come up with a credible alternative,” journalist and seasoned political commentator Panos Polyzoidis told Al Jazeera.

Mitsotakis’ party had promised to revive the Greek economy, but the COVID-19 pandemic, a refugee crisis with Turkey and energy inflation from the war in Ukraine undermined much of the government’s executive power.

Still, it managed to cut corporate and personal taxes, reduce unemployment, balance the budget, and increase foreign investment.

Mitsotakis now vows to “move much faster and with more audacity to fulfill our electoral commitments”.

Those include boosting exports, raising salaries and cutting more taxes.

What about the opposition?

Syriza’s precipitous drop of more than 31 percent of the vote four years ago has led many to predict its demise as a political force.

“The disappointment is that there is no opposition now,” said Lefteris Dragomanidis, a Syriza voter who has a stand at a farmers’ market in Athens. “I think in the next election Syriza will go back to where it was before, and KINAL will rise up. We all know that Syriza voters used to be KINAL.”

Ten years ago, during the global financial crisis, Greece’s ruling socialists radically cut government spending to tame the country’s massive deficit. While the cuts drove many socialist voters into unemployment and poverty, Syriza welcomed them.

When the Panhellenic Socialist Movement, or PASOK, came to power with 44 percent of the vote in 2009, Syriza barely passed the 3 percent threshold to enter parliament, winning 4.6 percent.

They switched places for six years. Syriza came to power in 2015 with a transfusion of PASOK supporters and won 36 percent of the vote. PASOK dropped to 4.7 percent and renamed itself Movement for Change, or KINAL.

KINAL’s performance under new leader Nikos Androulakis is a 50 percent increase from 2019. “I thank all the Greeks for tonight’s great victory, for co-signing the rebirth of PASOK,” said the 44-year-old on election night.

“The Syriza project failed, and that means PASOK is back in pole position to lead that centre-left,” said Polyzoidis.

“That will take years. I don’t expect them to recover anytime soon. So Mitsotakis will have an open road for years to come,” he added.

“We know that Tsipras hoped to make Syriza the main party of the centre-left,” the commentator said. “He definitely didn’t do this because Syriza remains a plethora of different shades of left and centre-left without a clear identity.”

Syriza, too, was eventually burned by the fire of austerity. Before taking office eight years ago, the party had pledged to tear up Greece’s emergency loans with creditors bailing out the Greek state, only to sign one itself later.

But it also suffered a spectacular run of own goals.

Tsipras was unable to purge Syriza of what his opponents call “crazy links” when he failed to contain the influence of former Health Minister Pavlos Polakis, a die-hard populist.

Days before the election, Tsipras was forced to sack Shadow Foreign Minister Yiorgos Katrougalos after he said Syriza should put a heavier burden on the self-employed – a cohort of one million. Opinion polls showed that 9 percent of them switched to New Democracy on Election Day.

Also before the vote, police in the central city of Karditsa caught five Syriza officers in a car carrying about 200 personal ID cards, envelopes filled with cash and ballots marked to support a local party candidate.

Syriza lost support not only to KINAL, but also to the Communist Party of Greece, which went from 5.3 percent to 7.2 percent of the vote.

There was a huge difference in style between the two best parties.

New Democracy set macroeconomic targets for growth, jobs, exports and the national debt. Syriza promised blanket wage increases without saying how they would be paid and did not appear to have a general idea of ​​its national economic goals.

“[Tsipras] campaigned based on what was wrong with New Democracy, not what he was going to do for people,” said Dragomanidis’ aide at the farmer’s market. “He painted everything black.”