Because no government can be formed in Greece, there will be another election in June. Until then, the country needs an interim government. It is led by the President of the Greek Court of Accounts, Sarmas.
Before the new elections in June, Greece got an interim head of government: it is the senior lawyer Ioannis Sarmas. The previous President of the Court of Auditors was appointed by President Katerina Sakellaropoulou.
“It is a constitutional obligation and at the same time my duty as a citizen to accept this,” Sarmas said. He is to form a government that will lead the country until the new parliamentary elections on June 25th.
coalition building rejected by parties
Sakellaropoulou initiated the constitutional steps for new elections. This had become necessary because the results of Sunday’s parliamentary elections made it impossible to form a government. Sakellaropoulou received the leaders of the five parliamentary parties in Athens to discuss again whether forming a coalition is possible. The meeting was a formality and only lasted half an hour – the politicians had already rejected a coalition in the past few days.
The conservative Nea Dimokratia (ND) of Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis emerged as the clear winner from the elections with 40.8 percent. The largest opposition party, the left-wing Syriza under Alexis Tsipras, lost heavily and ended up at 20 percent. The social democratic Pasok came to eleven percent.
A grand coalition between ND and Syriza was ruled out for political reasons – the two parties are too far apart thematically and ideologically. The other parties either did not want to or could not come together.
Mitsotakis relies on new elections
Prime Minister Mitsotakis also announced that he wanted to govern alone. A special feature of Greek electoral law makes this theoretically possible: in the next elections, which are likely to take place on June 25, the strongest party will receive at least 20 additional seats in the 300-strong parliament. If the ND achieves a similarly high result as in the first election, it would have an absolute majority.
Mitsotakis is now counting on the new election and hopes, thanks to the system for extra seats, to get a sufficient majority to form a government with his party alone as before.