Jun 25, 2023 at 2:25 am BST
Updated 2 minutes ago
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Kyriakos Mitsotakis is likely to win more than a month ago in Sunday’s election
Early results suggest that Greek conservative leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis is on track to win a second term as prime minister and a majority in parliament.
In May he defeated center-left rival Syriza but called snap elections to win enough seats to govern alone.
His New Democracy party won 40.4% of the vote, 20 points ahead of Syriza with more than half of the votes counted.
The vote came eleven days after the tragedy of a refugee boat off Greece that is believed to have killed 500 people.
Despite three days of mourning, the disaster had little impact on the election campaign and Greeks voted to maintain economic stability.
Under Greek electoral rules, a second election will give the Conservatives an extra number of seats in Parliament, but the exact number will depend on the final result.
Former Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’ Syriza party failed to ameliorate its defeat last month.
But there was success for the newly formed far-right Spartans party, which would appear to clear the three percent threshold for entry into parliament.
The Spartans only emerged as a political force this month when Greece’s Supreme Court banned another far-right party, the Greeks, and its imprisoned founder campaigned full force on them.
Greek commentators spoke of a “crime thriller” with several smaller parties trying to cross the threshold.
But the main theme of the election was that 55-year-old Kyriakos Mitsotakis, whose Conservatives had already beaten Alexis Tsipras’ Syriza by 20 points in the first election, widened his lead.
The New Democracy leader is a rarity in Greek politics, having increased his share of the vote since the 2019 election.
He is credited with successfully returning the Greek economy to stability and growth after a severe debt crisis and three international bailouts.
Though many Greeks are grappling with the cost of living crisis, voters chose to follow the party’s promises of lower taxes and better public health.
As New Democracy headed for a major victory, the left electorate was fragmented: the socialist PASOK garnered more than 11% and the communist KKE around 7%.
The Conservative leader has earned a reputation as a Teflon-coated leader who has fought off a series of devastating crises over the past year, including a rail disaster and a wiretapping scandal that brought down the intelligence chief and his own nephew, who worked there as the prime minister’s chief of staff.
Greece was being led by an interim government when a refugee boat sank off the southwest coast in the early hours of June 14.
Since the refugee crisis, the views of most Greek voters have shifted in favor of stricter, more conservative politics, says Panos Koliastasis, an assistant professor of politics at the University of Peloponnese.
“The reason lies in the 2020 migration crisis on the Evros [river], as Turkey tried to push thousands of migrants into Greek territory and the Mitsotakis government acted quickly. Therefore, much of the public perceives the migration issue as an external threat to national sovereignty.”