Mitsotakis’s conservatives clinch landslide Greece election win

Conservative leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis won Greece’s national elections on Sunday with a clear majority, securing a second term during which he vowed to bring about major reforms to transform the country.

With nearly all the votes counted, Mitsotakis’s New Democracy party obtained a score of over 40.5 per cent, well ahead of the leftist Syriza party led by former premier Alexis Tsipras, which came in with less than 18 per cent.

The margin is the widest for the conservatives in almost 50 years, as voters rewarded them for nursing Greece back to economic health after a crippling debt crisis.

“The people have given us a safe majority. Major reforms will proceed rapidly,” Mitsotakis said, adding that he had “ambitious” targets for a new term that could “transform” Greece.

The 55-year-old former McKinsey consultant and Harvard graduate, who steered the EU nation from the coronavirus pandemic back to two consecutive years of strong growth, had already a scored a thumping win in an election just a month ago.

But having fallen short by five seats in parliament of being able to form a single-party government, he refused to try to form a coalition, in effect forcing 9.8 million Greek voters back to the ballot boxes.

The election also saw voters turn away from two key protagonists during the debt years, with former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis’s radical-left MeRA25 party failing to make it past the three percent threshold to get into parliament, while Tsipras’s party scored even less than in May, losing a further 275,000 votes.

‘Judgment’

“We have sustained a serious political defeat,” Tsipras said in an address following his fifth loss to Mitsotakis, and his third in a national election.

The 48-year-old former premier said that his party needed a “top to bottom” reappraisal before next year’s European Parliament elections, and that he would submit his leadership to the “judgment” of Syriza party members.

Tsipras remains for many the prime minister who nearly crashed Greece out of the euro, and the leader who reneged on a vow of abolishing austerity to sign the country on to more painful bailout terms.

With the strong swing to the right—including the return of the far right after a four-year hiatus—Varoufakis said his left-wing party would be sorely missed in parliament.

To the dismay of centrist groups, the nationalist party Spartiates (Spartans), which is endorsed by the jailed former spokesman of the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn, made it past the three-per cent threshold to get into parliament, along with two small similar parties.

With the total proportion of votes garnered by the three parties reaching 12.9 percent, Tsipras said the strongest showing of Greek hard-right parties in decades was a “visible” threat to democracy.

Voter fatigue was also evident after a second election in a month, with the turnout at under 53 per cent compared to over 61 per cent in May.

High hopes

Mitsotakis first became prime minister in 2019, beating his predecessor Tsipras on a vow to move on from a decade of economic crisis.

That election was the first in the EU nation’s post-bailout era, at a time when businesses and workers were ailing under the burden of heavy taxes imposed by Syriza to build a budget surplus demanded by international creditors.

Over the next four years, tax burdens were eased, and while the Covid-19 pandemic wiped out Greece’s vital tourism revenues, the country has since bounced back with growth of 8.3 per cent in 2021 and 5.9 per cent last year.

Mitsotakis played up Greece’s newfound economic health in his re-election bid, saying his conservatives had cut 50 taxes while increasing national output by 29 billion euros ($32 billion) and overseeing the largest infrastructure upgrades since 1975.

The message appeared to have gone down well with voters weary of Greece’s debt years that were awash with job losses, rising payments and companies going bankrupt.

Aris Manopoulos, a shop owner, said he “voted for New Democracy so that the country can advance, and continue to revive economically”.