There were no surprises in Athens on Sunday as the centre-right ruling New Democracy party comfortably rallied to secure a second four-year term in elections that saw severe losses for the leftist Syriza Party.
The EPP-aligned New Democracy benefited from its positive economic credentials among voters and new electoral rules which granted additional seats to the largest party. New Democracy was projected to win 42% of votes and 158 out of 300 seats in Greece’s unicameral Parliament according to exit polls released Sunday evening.
Greeks were voting for the second time in two months after a May election failed to give New Democracy an outright majority. New Democracy leader and Greek PM Kyriakos Mitsotakis took a gamble by calling fresh elections, hoping to benefit from new electoral laws that would grant the largest party 25 to 50 bonus seats as well as from growing disunity in the Greek Left.
Without a doubt, the main losers of the weekend election were the socialist Syriza Party which suffered heavily from vote splitting by rival Marxist parties such as the communist KKE and other radical groups.
Syriza shed approximately a third of its vote from last month’s May election. Voters appear to have cooled on the party which led the country through during the latter half of the Greek financial crisis until 2019
New Democracy fared better than expected, even cutting into working-class areas of Athens and the socialist stronghold of Crete as voters opted for the stability of a centre-right government over the still largely discredited Greek Left.
According to many Greek pundits, New Democracy capitalised on portraying themselves as a pro-business safe pair of hands, able to provide economic stability to voters anxious not to see a repeat of the turbulent recession years. Immigration did not feature heavily in the election despite attempts by the Left and open-border NGOs to push pro-migration policies in the aftermath of last week’s migrant shipwreck off the Greek coast.
It was a good day for the Greek ultra-right as well. The nationalist Spartans Party, acknowledged by most as another rebranding of the banned Golden Dawn, are expected to cross the 3% threshold needed for parliamentary representation. Greek lawmakers have been bearing down hard on Greek nationalists in recent months. A front group for Golden Dawn was banned in the lead-up to last month’s elections on questionable legal grounds.
It was also a positive showing for the Niki or Victory Party which caters to Orthodox religious conservatives. The party, founded in 2019 and operating on a socially conservative anti-immigration platform, also crossed the 3% threshold required for parliamentary representation.
All in all, it was a bad result for the Greek Left which failed to capitalise on wiretapping scandals and the February train disaster to challenge Greece’s centre-right hegemony. New Democracy will proceed with its pro-European platform as it continues to transform the Mediterranean nation from a fiscally irresponsible to one of the EU’s most pro-business nations.
