Global Courant
Conservative leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis won Greece’s national elections with a clear majority on Sunday, securing a second term in office in which he pledged to implement major reforms to transform the country.
With nearly all the votes counted, Mitsotakis’ New Democracy party secured a score of more than 40.5 percent, well ahead of the left-wing Syriza party led by former Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, which scored less than 18 percent.
The margin is the largest for the Conservatives in nearly 50 years as voters rewarded them for Greece’s recovery from a crippling debt crisis.
“The people have given us a secure majority. Major reforms will happen soon,” Mitsotakis said, adding that he had “ambitious” goals for another term that could “transform” Greece.
The 55-year-old former McKinsey consultant and Harvard graduate, who led the EU nation from the coronavirus pandemic back to two consecutive years of strong growth, had already won a landslide victory in an election a month ago.
But, falling short of five parliamentary seats to form a one-party government, he refused to try to form a coalition, effectively forcing 9.8 million Greek voters to go back to the polls.
During the election, voters also turned away from two key players during the debt years.
Former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis’s radical left MeRA25 party failed to pass the three percent threshold to enter parliament, while Tsipras’s party scored even less than in May, receiving a further 275,000 votes lost.
– ‘Judgement’ –
US President Joe Biden congratulated Mitsotakis on his victory.
“I look forward to continuing our close cooperation on shared priorities to promote prosperity and regional security,” he said in a statement.
French President Emmanuel Macron also congratulated. “Let’s continue together with all the work that has been done for a stronger and more sovereign Europe,” he wrote on Twitter.
And Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani offered his congratulations. Mitsotakis’ re-election was “a sign of political stability that is good for all of Europe,” he wrote on Twitter.
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Tsipras meanwhile estimated the damage.
“We have suffered a serious political defeat,” he said in a speech following his fifth defeat to Mitsotakis – his third in a national election.
The 48-year-old former prime minister said his party needed a “top-down” reappraisal for next year’s European Parliament elections.
He would submit his leadership to the “judgment” of members of the Syriza party, he added.
For many, Tsipras remains the prime minister who nearly drove Greece out of the euro, the leader who reneged on a vow to scrap austerity to sign the country with more painful bailout terms.
With the strong move to the right – including the return of the far right after a four-year hiatus – Varoufakis said his left party would be sorely missed in parliament.
To the dismay of centrist groups, the nationalist party Spartiates (Spartans) succeeded in passing the three percent threshold to enter parliament, along with two small similar parties. The party is supported by the imprisoned former spokesman of the neo-Nazi party Gouden Dageraad.
With a three-party aggregate vote of 12.9 percent, Tsipras said the strongest outcry by Greek hard-right parties in decades posed a “visible” threat to democracy.
Voter fatigue was also evident after a second election in a month: turnout was less than 53 percent compared to over 61 percent in May.
– High expectations –
Mitsotakis first became prime minister in 2019, beating his predecessor Tsipras with a vow to move on after a decade of economic crisis.
That election was the first in the EU country’s post-bailout era, at a time when businesses and workers weighed down under the burden of heavy taxes imposed by Syriza to build a budget surplus that international creditors demanded.
Over the next four years, tax burdens eased, and while the Covid-19 pandemic wiped out Greece’s vital tourism revenue, the country has since recovered with growth of 8.3 percent in 2021 and 5.9 percent last year.
Mitsotakis played on Greece’s newfound economic health in his re-election bid by saying his Conservatives had cut 50 taxes while boosting national output by 29 billion euros ($32 billion) and overseeing the biggest infrastructure upgrades since 1975.
The message seemed to be well received by voters fed up with Greece’s debt years awash with job losses, rising payments and companies going bankrupt.
Aris Manopoulos, a store owner, said he “voted for New Democracy so the country can move forward and continue to revive economically.”
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