There was a time when elections in Greece were exciting. During the long years of crisis, all of Europe looked to who ruled Athens and what that meant for the continent. The governments in Athens changed frequently and the country was in turmoil. Those times are obviously over.
Sunday’s election ended as most observers had predicted: the new prime minister is the old one. Kyriakos Mitsotakis, in office since 2019, has been re-elected for another four years. His conservative Nea Dimokratia (ND) won an absolute majority. And probably mainly because Mitsotakis promised the opposite of excitement: no experiments. However, Mitsotakis performed a little less strongly than expected, largely due to a few small right-wing parties making it into parliament.
The election was the second in a month because neither party was able to form a government in the first election on May 21. Now, in the new election, a new electoral law introduced by Mitsotakis came into force for the first time, according to which the strongest party gets up to 50 bonus seats in parliament.
The left-wing Syriza does even worse than in the May election
So it is that the ND, with 40.6 percent of the votes, does not need a coalition partner, it has 158 out of 300 seats. The left-wing Syriza led by Alexis Tsipras, Mitsotakis’ predecessor, achieved an even worse result than in the May election: with just under 17.8 percent of the vote, it is not far ahead of the third strongest force, the social democratic Pasok, which had 11, 9 percent comes.
The rest of the spectrum is heavily fragmented. The communist KKE still sits in parliament, as does the right-wing national “Greek solution”. New: the Niki, a religious right-wing party with ties to orthodox monasticism and Putin. The “Spartans,” the successors of the neo-Nazi party “Golden Dawn,” account for 4.7 percent. Their leader is in prison.
So the new Greek parliament is heavily right-leaning, beyond the governing ND, which itself caters to the right-wing audience. During the crisis, most Greek voters leaned more towards left-wing populism than right-wing populism, and that too seems to be over.
It’s not as if Mitsotakis got through his first term unchallenged. Just last week, the country was shaken by the boat accident off the coast of the Peloponnese, in which several hundred people are believed to have died – the survivors accuse the Greek coast guard of being at least partly to blame.
The pushbacks, the train accident, the wiretapping scandal: all apparently not decisive
But Mitsotakis, who stands for a hard line against refugees, including illegal pushbacks in the Aegean, remained politically unscathed. Even the serious train accident in February with at least 57 dead, which pointed to deficiencies in the railway system and thus in the state apparatus, could not harm him. Just like a wiretapping scandal last year: the Greek secret service, which reports directly to Mitsotakis, had eavesdropped on the current head of the opposition party, Pasok, among other things.
Apparently none of this was decisive for the voters. The majority of Mitsotakis’ followers support his migration policy, and they see him as the man who finally gave the country a fresh start. When Mitsotakis replaced his predecessor Alexis Tsipras in the summer of 2019, he had been implementing the austerity program of Greece’s creditors for years. He left Mitsotakis a delicate upswing.
It got stronger in the years that followed. During the pandemic, Mitsotakis made sure that many Greeks felt supported by the state for the first time – with regular payments. The state appeared digitally for the first time with the “gov.gr” portal. Tourism has been booming again since last year, and the economy is growing.
Alexis Tsipras, on the other hand, probably remained the face of the crisis for many in the country. During the election campaign, he promised left-wing politics, more justice, this time “without a troika, without Schäuble.” Schäuble? It sounded like Tsipras was still living in the past. Every time he was prime minister implementing the austerity program he was elected to avert in early 2015. Tsipras never managed to shake off the stigma of betrayal.
Mitsotakis’ victory, as many in Greece see it, is above all the defeat of Syriza, i.e. Tsipras. The question will be whether Alexis Tsipras can still hold on as party chairman and opposition leader. On the other hand, his party has hardly any other figure who could replace him. It is possible that Syriza – the party that emerged from the crisis – will approach insignificance in the next few years.
Very many Greeks saw no alternative for themselves on Sunday. Voter turnout was just over 52 percent. Perhaps this is also a sign that the grueling crisis years are over: In Greece, many people no longer feel like politics. Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the old and new prime minister, can live with that.