ATHENS (AP) — The leader of the conservative New Democracy party, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, vowed to expedite reforms after his landslide victory Sunday in Greece’s second election in five weeks, giving him a comfortable parliamentary majority that allows him to form a government for a second four-year term.
Jubilant supporters gathered outside the party’s headquarters in Athens, cheering, clapping, lighting fireworks and waving blue and white party flags. The almost complete results show that New Democracy has won just over 40.5% of the vote, crushing its main rival, the left-wing party Syriza, which was struggling to reach 18%, two percentage points below the last elections in May.
“With today’s election result, Greece opens a new and historic chapter on its path,” Mitsotakis, 55, said in a televised statement. The voters, he noted, “gave us a strong mandate to move faster down the path of the great changes our country needs. In a sonorous and mature way they have permanently closed a traumatic cycle of lies and toxicity that slowed the country and divided society.
His second term as prime minister “can transform Greece into a dynamic pace of development that will increase wages and reduce inequality, with better quality and free public health care, with a more effective and digitized state and a strong country,” he added. .
Sunday’s polls came just over a week after a migrant boat capsized and sank off the western coast of Greece, leaving hundreds dead and missing and raising questions about authorities’ actions. Greeks and the country’s strict migration policy. But the tragedy – one of the worst in the Mediterranean in recent years – did not affect the elections, with internal economic problems being the priority for voters.
Mitsotakis’s party is forecast to win 158 of the 300 seats in parliament, thanks to a change in electoral law that gives the winning party additional seats. In the previous elections in May, carried out under a system of proportional representation, he fell five seats short of obtaining a majority despite receiving almost 41% of the vote, and had decided to try to obtain a stronger popular mandate in a second election in instead of trying to form a coalition government with a smaller party.
However, voter turnout was low on Sunday, just shy of 53% of eligible voters, compared with just over 61% in the May poll.
In all, eight parties were passing the 3% threshold to enter parliament, including an ultra-religious one and a far-right party backed by a jailed former lawmaker from the Nazi-inspired and now-outlawed Golden Dawn Party.
Mitsotakis campaigned on a platform of ensuring economic growth and political stability as Greece gradually recovers from a brutal financial crisis of nearly a decade.
His main rival, Alexis Tsipras, 48, was prime minister from 2015 to 2019, part of the most turbulent years of the Greek financial crisis. The results he got on Sunday leave him fighting for his political survival. Following his poor performance in the May election, he had struggled to mobilize his voter base, a task made more difficult by the rise of parties made up of some of his former associates.
“Obviously the election results are negative for us,” a subdued Tsipras said in a televised statement. “We have suffered a serious electoral defeat. But I think that the electoral result is negative mainly for society and for democracy, ”he added, mentioning the three small right-wing parties that obtained enough votes to enter Parliament.
It will be up to the party members, he said, to decide what his fate will be, and the direction the party itself should now take.
The members of the party will be “summoned to judge us all and to devise the strategy that responds to these difficult circumstances.”
Mitsotakis, a Harvard graduate, comes from one of Greece’s best-known political families. His late father, Constantine Mitsotakis, was prime minister in the 1990s, his sister was a chancellor and his nephew is the mayor of Athens. Kyriakos Mitsotakis has pledged to reposition Greece as a pro-business and fiscally responsible country as a member of the eurozone.
So far the strategy has worked. New Democracy crushed Syriza in May, with crucial victories over the socialists on the island of Crete and in low-income areas around Athens, sometimes for the first time.
Sunday’s polls were held under an electoral system that awards a bonus of between 25 and 50 seats to the winning party, depending on its performance, making it easier for a party to win more than the required 151 seats in Parliament to form a government.
