The polls spoke loud and clear: Greek society has overcome the crisis and wants to leave behind the era of extremes. The comfortable victory this Sunday of the conservative prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, surprised but not as much as the great defeat of an Alexis Tsipras who trusted until the last moment that Greece would end at the polls “the nightmare of the regime of injustices” of New Democracy (ND). Shortly after the polls closed, with a blue-tinted political map, the Syriza leader could only acknowledge: “Fights have winners and losers.”
With a difference between the winner and the loser of 20 points, when the pre-election polls predicted a difference of only 7 points, the Greeks have not only made it clear that they do not want Syriza in the Government, but they are not convinced by the opposition either. And that is where the historic PASOK Socialist Party – the other great winner of the elections – which Syriza ousted in 2012 with his populist speech in the midst of the economic crisis, comes back into the game. With 11% of the votes (the polls did not give them more than 8 points) PASOK aspires to recover the center-left voter and once again become the other pole of the Greek political ecosystem together with New Democracy. Following the elections, party leader Nikos Androulakis appealed to voters to “strengthen ND’s true and genuine opponent”, a statement implying that the most favorable scenario for the Socialists is a repeat election for try to eat up even more ground for Syriza.
One of the slogans repeated by Androulakis during the campaign is that “Tsipras is the biggest sponsor of Mitsotakis”, that is, that Syriza only exists to confront the conservatives, but that it does not represent a real leadership option. The truth is that Tsipras has used for these elections the same strategy that gave him victory in 2015: a polarizing speech, with darts against the middle class and aggressive personal attacks on Mitsotakis, whom he has compared to the Hungarian leader, Viktor Orban, due to measures such as the Evros wall, on the Turkish border, with which the majority of parties and citizens agreed and which has reduced migratory flows by 90%, taking the debate off the agenda.
Syriza has even gone so far as to wink at the orphan voters of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party, outlawed in 2020, and at their heirs from Greeks for the Fatherland, banned from the elections by justice. Her exclusion represented another symbol of the rejection of extremes in the new post-crisis Greece, as well as the fact that MeRA25, the anti-EU and anti-NATO party of Yanis Varoufakis, has been left out of Parliament by not reaching the necessary 3% of the votes. Tsipras has also been rejected by the young people, confronted with the government after the Tempe railway tragedy, and to whom the Syriza leader made repeated appeals to bet on his party as a “punishment vote” for Mitsotakis. The new generations, however, have preferred the left of the KKE Communist Party, which won the student elections last week and on Sunday garnered 7.3% of the vote.
Mitsotakis, who for this campaign has opted for a positive discourse focused on stability with a view to the future, has weathered three crises during his first government: immigration, Covid and energy derived from the war in Ukraine. And, given the electoral result, the Greeks have approved his administrative efficiency and his economic management over scandals. “Greece is a very different country from 2015 in which the speeches of then are no longer valid. People want progress and solutions to the problems that we still have: salaries are not high and there is inflation; the administration does not work well, it is needed a modernization of the public sector and have the feeling that the country adapts to the needs of a future that is already here”, analyzes Ino Afentouli, director of the Greek Institute of International Relations.
The prime minister began the countdown on Sunday to achieve his objective: “a self-sufficient government”, which will be easy for him to obtain with a second election, scheduled for the end of June, in which the electoral law that gives 50 extra seats for the winner with which he will reach the absolute majority. This morning, Mitsotakis communicated to the president of the country, Katerina Sakellaropoulo, her intention not to exhaust the three days of the exploratory mandate established by law and to return it this afternoon to speed up the process. The prime minister hopes that both Tsipras and Androulakis will also return their mandates as soon as possible and the electoral process will be opened.
With the backing of a new government, Mitsotakis – the first head of state to be re-elected after the crisis – Greece has returned to the path of traditional politics followed by conservatives and socialists before the irruption of Syriza, which will now have to seek new your space, if you still have it. “In Greece we still remember the crisis because it wasn’t that long ago, but we prefer to forget those years because they were very hard. We are an extroverted society, we don’t like being in crisis. I think that period has brought a wave of solidarity with Greece though; Europeans sympathize with us, they come for tourism and promote the country. The brutal attack on Greece, especially from the German press, turned around, because after all we are not the worst country. We have not committed a crime, it was not fault of the Greek people”, concludes Afentouli.
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