Greek polling stations opened at 7 a.m. locally (4 a.m. GMT) on Sunday, May 21. For these legislative elections, the outgoing right-wing Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, is on track to be re-elected. But he could be forced to a new ballot for lack of a stable majority. Facing him, the leader of the left Syriza, Alexis Tsipras, wants to take over the reins of the country, after a first term from 2015 to 2019 marked by a showdown with the European Union and then the capitulation.
Exit polls will be published when the polls close at 7 p.m. (4 p.m. GMT). In the western Athens suburb of Aigaleo, 67-year-old retiree Maria Tombabakis would like “a change” but is “not very optimistic”. Evgenia, a 41-year-old woman who did not give her name, had “difficulty making a choice”.
The electoral campaign, deemed sluggish, ended Friday evening when at the foot of the Acropolis hill, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, 55, asked voters for a new four-year term to continue building a ” new Greece”. At the same time, his rival Alexis Tsipras predicted the end of the “nightmare” on Sunday and accused the government of pursuing an economic policy that led to “the middle class living on food stamps”.
For months, the polls have given the conservative leader of New Democracy (ND) a comfortable lead, between 5 and 7 points.
ND is thus credited with 32.7% of voting intentions and Syriza with 26%, according to a survey by Arco on Thursday. In third position, the socialist party Pasok-Kinal could collect 8.3% of the vote. But such a score for the right would not allow it to govern alone. But Kyriakos Mitsotakis ruled out forming a coalition, in a country whose political culture is not based on compromise.
“Our goal is to have an absolute majority,” insisted Kyriakos Mitsotakis in an interview with To Vima newspaper on Sunday, saying this is a guarantee of stability. “The real question is are we going to go forward or back? Who will be in charge of the country in the face of a Turkey whose future is uncertain? ” he added.
Alexis Tsipras, 48, has already made foot calls to Pasok-Kinal leader Nikos Androulakis, but the latter has made demands. If it is impossible to form a government, which many analysts predict, a new ballot will have to be called at the end of June or the beginning of July.
On an electoral tour from Crete to the Turkish border, Mr. Mitsotakis has constantly brandished his economic record. Falling unemployment, growth of nearly 6% last year, return of investment and soaring tourism, the economy has picked up again after years of acute crisis and European bailouts.
But the decline in purchasing power and the difficulties of making ends meet remain the main concerns of a population that has made painful sacrifices over the past ten years. Many Greeks have to make do with low wages and have lost faith in drastically reduced public services after drastic weight loss treatments. The country is still suffering from a public debt of more than 170% of its GDP.
“We’re going from bad to worse. We just work to survive,” said Giorgos Antonopoulos, 39, a shop worker in Thessaloniki, the country’s second city. At the end of February, the train disaster that killed 57 people awakened the anger that has plagued Greece since the crisis and sparked demonstrations against the conservative government accused of negligence in safety on the rail network.
Son of a former Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis is also blamed for a scandal of illegal telephone tapping targeting politicians and journalists. In March, the European Parliament denounced “serious threats to the rule of law and fundamental rights” in Greece, according to Dutch MEP Sophia in’t Veld.
Greece, bottom of the EU in terms of freedom of the press in the annual ranking of Reporters Without Borders, is also regularly accused of turning back migrants to Turkey. On Friday, the American daily New York Times published a video attesting to such illegal practices, which Athens vehemently denies.
