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GREEK PRIME MINISTER Kyriakos Mitsotakis is embarking on a second term after voters handed him a huge election victory for the second time in five weeks.
Voters in Greece gave the conservatives their widest winning margin in almost 50 years yesterday.
Hailing the “strong mandate”, Mitsotakis said that “major reforms will proceed rapidly”, adding that he had “ambitious” targets for his next four years in power that could “transform” Greece.
Among his pledges is pouring money into Greece’s public health system — which was stretched to its limits by the Covid-19 pandemic — and improving railway safety after the deaths of 57 people in a February train collision that was Greece’s worst rail disaster.
The 55-year-old former McKinsey consultant and Harvard graduate said yesterday that he “constantly strove to improve and learn from my mistakes”.
Mitsotakis, who steered the EU nation from the pandemic back to two consecutive years of strong growth, had already scored a resounding win in an election in May.
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.
His New Democracy party consolidated its win from the 21 May vote, while its nearest rival, the left-wing Syriza party of former premier Alexis Tsipras, saw a loss of tens of thousands of voters compared to just a month ago.
Tsipras, acknowledging a “serious political defeat”, said he was leaving his political fate to the “judgment” of Syriza members.
For many Greeks, Tsipras is the prime minister who nearly crashed Greece out of the euro, and who reneged on a vow of abolishing austerity to sign the country on to more painful bailout terms.
To the dismay of centrists, the strong swing to the right was also accompanied by the return of the far right into parliament.
“Fascists will enter parliament… this constitutes a completely toxic environment,” senior Syriza leader Costas Zachariadis told Skai TV.
Holding 158 seats in the 300-seat parliament, Mitsotakis will officially receive the mandate to form a government today from Greece’s head of state, President Katerina Sakellaropoulou.
The prime minister-elect is then expected to unveil his cabinet in the coming days, though names were already circulating even before the last votes were counted.
Mitsotakis’s trusted troubleshooter George Gerapetritis is being tipped as foreign minister in the new government.
A professor of constitutional law, Gerapetritis was enlisted in March to deal with the train tragedy, as well as a wiretapping scandal that implicated the prime minister’s office last year.
The former foreign minister, Nikos Dendias, a political moderate, is expected to move to the defence ministry.
The new finance minister is touted to be Kostis Hatzidakis, a veteran politician with past stints in the ministries of development, labour and transport.
Mitsotakis, who first became prime minister in 2019, has vowed to make economic stability a feature of his new term.
He promised not to raise taxes while creating more jobs in public healthcare after a shortage of nurses and doctors was painfully exposed during the pandemic.
He had also championed a tough anti-immigration line, appealing to the conservative base in an electoral campaign in which the recent deadly sinking of an overcrowded trawler failed to garner a mention.
Instead, three small nationalist parties with anti-migration policies marched into parliament, garnering between them nearly 13% of the vote.
One of them, Spartiates, is endorsed by the jailed former spokesman of the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn.
Tsipras said the strongest showing of Greek hard-right parties in decades was a “visible” threat to democracy.
Voter fatigue was also evident in the second election in a month, with the turnout at under 53% compared to over 61 percent in May.
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seems to be a big shift in where voters in some parts of europe are aiming towards lately…
@Tom Newell – are you referring to the increased votes for hard right parties? If so, it’s hardly a new pattern. Orban, Bolsenaro, Trump, Lukashenko etc have been around for a while.
Society has become more polarised and the rich have gotten richer whilst those less well off have seen things like secure housing slip from ever being within their reach.
Hard right parties tend to point the finger of blame at visible boogiemen like immigrants and offer a narrative of being able to solve the issues by clamping down on migrants etc.
Desperate and uneducated voters fall for it and cast their ballots ignoring the fact that not one of these governments has ever actually delivered on their promises as they tend to end up mired in corruption.
Poverty and societal division worsened under all of the names above.
@Schrodingers Immigrant: I get what your saying but sadly the established parties across the board seem to have gotten way to comfy and have allowed alot of problems facing ordinary voters get out of control. I have always said countries esp in the EU need to look at things like brexit and trump being elected as warning signs that dont always assume people will keep voting for you cos the alternative mighten deliver or look bad when you dont seem to be offering much either…..but thats just my thinking
@Tom Newell: I agree with you, a lot of the reason that voters are falling for the rubbish that the hard right are spouting is the fact that they feel nobody else is listening to them and, on that front, they are correct.
The inequality in society is growing quickly and those who are less well off are seeing their situation worsen.
@Schrodingers Immigrant: People voting for the extremes are just fed up with the “establishment” as they like to say.
It’s understood when the major parties are often useless and just look for patron.
They have populist idea which resonates in many.
@Schrodingers Immigrant: Will you take your “hard right” nonsense and shove it where the sun don’t shine. Labelling anyone “hard right” who doesn’t agree with open borders, the nanny state, climate scare mongering, abortion or the alphabet agenda is laughable. Voters have had enough of Socialism and are making their voices heard at the ballot box.
@Schrodingers Immigrant: the hard right just got 13%, hardly a landslide.
The real story is that the centrist New Democracy got an overall majority, and the left wing Syriza got a well-deserved kicking.
People have finally got sick of populist nonsense; Syriza promised lots of free stuff, lots of walking away from debts and responsibilities, but people now see through that charade.
There are comparisons with Ireland’s Syriza, SF has dropped another three points this weekend as their spoofing fools an increasingly shrinking number if voters.
@John Mulligan: The more woke Sinn Fein go the more broke they become.
Hard right/hard left all theatre.
BUT–BUT I thought that Paul Murphy and Pearse Doherty went out there with the solutions for Greek problems just a few years ago!!
@John McDonagh: where is Pearse Doherty, and why are they hiding him?
Or is he too busy moving into his second home mansion with the five bedrooms and multiple garages, the one he built on the average industrial wage?
Greece votes incorrectly. So I guess that leaves 2 options – they keep haing elections until the correct thinking government is chosen OR the result is ignored and the correct thinking government is installed.
Tricky business this democracy thing
ND are conservative. Not far right. 15% is the norm for extremist parties, who have to betray their fundamental beliefs to get higher votes aka SF in our case.
What ‘messages’ are Greek voters sending, and to whom, where and what?
@Garreth Byrne: they want the stability of a party of the centre. They gave the populist looney left Syriza party a shot at it, and they didn’t deliver, so they’ve kicked them out.
A bit like here, with voters waking up to the SF blather and populist nonsense.
@John Mulligan: the SYRIZA party are not populist loony left as you put it, they were the party who put an end to the cycle of memorandum after memorandum, they took on a bankrupt country and managed to deliver they also left 37 billion in the state coffers which had never happened before. They regulated the debt payments, sorted out the issue with North Macedonia…New Democracy had 60 billion to play with in recovery funding from the EU and as they usually do, they gave out plenty of handouts to ensure they were re elected.
IMF will safe the day.. Again for the
P. I. G. S..
have your say