Greeks conservatives win rerun election in a landslide

Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s New Democracy party have secured their widest electoral margin in almost 50 years.

Kyriakos Mitsotakis reaches out to supporters in Athens on Sunday night. Picture: AFP

Conservative leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis has won Greece’s ­national elections with a clear ­majority, securing a second term during which he vowed to transform the country.

With nearly all the votes counted overnight on Sunday, Mr Mitsotakis’s New Democracy party obtained about 40.5 per cent of the ballots, well ahead of the leftist Syriza party led by former premier Alexis Tsipras, which secured less than 18 per cent.

The margin is the widest for the conservatives in almost 50 years, as voters rewarded them for nursing Greece back to economic health after a crippling debt crisis.

“The people have given us a safe majority. Major reforms will proceed rapidly,” Mr Mitsotakis said, adding that he had “ambitious” targets for a new term that could “transform” Greece.

The 55-year-old former McKinsey consultant and Harvard graduate, who steered the EU nation from the coronavirus pandemic back to two consecutive years of strong growth, had already scored a thumping win in an election just a month ago.

But having fallen short by five parliamentary seats 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. This time, thanks to a different electoral system, the conservatives are likely to win 158 seats in the 300-seat parliament.

At the election voters turned away from two key protagonists during the debt years.

Former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis’s radical-left MeRA25 party failed to make it past the 3 per cent threshold to get into parliament, while Syriza fared even worse of than in May, losing a further 275,000 votes.

Mr Tsipras assessed the damage. “We have sustained a serious political defeat,” he said after his fifth loss to Mitsotakis – his third in a national election.

The 48-year-old said that his party needed a “top-to-bottom” reappraisal before next year’s ­European parliament elections. He would submit his leadership to the “judgment” of Syriza party members.

Mr Tsipras remains for many the prime minister who nearly crashed Greece out of the euro; who reneged on a vow of abolishing austerity to sign the country on to more painful bailout terms.

With the strong swing to the right, including the return of the far right after a four-year hiatus, Mr Varoufakis said his left-wing party would be sorely missed in parliament. To the dismay of centrist groups, the nationalist party Spartiates (Spartans) made it past the 3 per cent threshold to get into parliament, along with two small similar parties. The party is ­endorsed by the jailed former spokesman of the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn. With the total proportion of votes garnered by the three parties reaching 12.9 per cent, Mr Tsipras said the strongest showing of Greek hard-right parties in decades was a “visible” threat to democracy.

Voter fatigue was evident after a second election in a month: turnout was less than 53 per cent compared to over 61 per cent in May.

Mr Mitsotakis first became prime minister in 2019, beating Mr Tsipras on a vow to move on from a decade of economic crisis. That election was the first in the post-bailout era, at a time when businesses and workers were ailing under the burden of heavy taxes imposed by Syriza to build a budget surplus demanded by international creditors.

Over the next four years, tax burdens were eased, and while the pandemic wiped out Greece’s vital tourism revenues, the country has since bounced back with growth of 8.3 per cent in 2021 and 5.9 per cent last year.

Mr Mitsotakis played up Greece’s new-found economic health in his re-election bid, saying his conservatives had cut 50 taxes while increasing national output by €29bn ($47bn) and overseeing the largest infrastructure upgrades since 1975. The message appeared to have gone down well with voters weary of Greece’s debt years that were awash with job losses, rising payments and companies going bankrupt.

AFP