After failing to win an outright majority in the May election, Greece’s ruling conservatives have won 53% of the seats in Greece’s parliament in a do-over election.
Greece’s conservative New Democracy party leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis vowed to speed up reforms following his landslide victory Sunday in the country’s second election in five weeks that granted him a comfortable parliamentary majority to form a government for a second four-year term.
New Democracy won about 41% of the popular vote, compared to 18% for its main opponent, the left-wing Syriza party, which got 2% less of the vote than in the May elections, where New Democracy won the most seats but failed to secure an outright majority of seats in parliament.
“With today’s electoral result, Greece opens a new, historic chapter in its course,” Mitsotakis said. Greek voters “gave us a strong mandate to move faster on the course of the big changes our country needs. In a loud and mature way they have permanently closed a traumatic cycle of lies and toxicity that held the country back and divided society.”
Sunday’s vote came a week after a migrant ship capsized and sank off the western coast of Greece, leaving hundreds of people dead and missing and calling into question the actions of Greek authorities and the country’s strict migration policy. But the disaster, one of the worst in the Mediterranean in recent years, did not affect the election, with domestic economic issues dominating the election campaign.
Mitsotakis’ party was projected to win 158 of Parliament’s 300 seats, thanks to a change in the electoral law that grants the winning party bonus seats. The previous election in May, conducted under a proportional representation system, left him five seats short of a majority despite winning nearly 41% of the vote. So he held a do-over election to seek an outright majority, rather than form an unstable coalition government with a smaller party.
Greece’s ruling conservative government is the country’s most competent government ever — and its least corrupt. It has gotten rid of a lot of pointless red tape that discouraged investment in Greece, and eliminated some wasteful government spending. But it had the bad luck to be in power when the COVID-19 pandemic battered the entire world, shrinking Greece’s economy and increasing an already high unemployment rate. That, and a February 28 rail disaster, kept the conservatives from winning an outright majority in today’s parliamentary election, even though the conservatives had boosted economic growth before and after the pandemic.
Mitsotakis, a Harvard-educated financial executive, won 2019 elections on a promise of business-oriented reforms and has vowed to continue tax cuts, boost investments and bolster middle-class employment.
