FROM OUR REPORTER
ATHENS Piles of Domino’s pizza boxes disappear in the metal detector and then in the elevator of the headquarters of New Democracy to Piraeus, where dusk gradually leads to the realization that the expected victory is actually a triumph.I conservatives have dubbed — 40.8% to 20.1% with 98% of ballots counted — Alexis Tsipras’ left-wing Syriza party.
Immediately after the pizza, and just before the exit polls, the outgoing (and now reconfirmed) prime minister also arrives Mitsotakis and he sails the blue sea of standard-issue Oxford shirts of militants, officials and even journalists who follow Nea Demokratia, almost all at least fifty, almost all men. The party has one overwhelming male majority, only two ministers and eight secretaries out of the 58 members of the outgoing executive; and after all, Greece has only had a female premier once and it lasted a month.
Mitsotakis disappears behind the pizzas and barricades himself in the offices on the third floor. He will come out after more than two hours between trumpets and roars, to comment on the first screenings, triumphant. «The country has given us a strong and absolute mandate and it is to govern alone», he articulates, and speaks of a «political earthquake» and of reforms «that can only be carried out with a full mandate».
The plan is now clear, and it is the one announced. With the electoral law in force, Nea Demokratia wins 146 deputies, 5 less than the absolute majority. Now Mitsotakis could, of course, “convince” five deputies from other parties to go with him: it’s old politics, it’s always been done, and five are few. Or he could ally himself with Pasok, a former mass party that has now turned the balance with about 12% of the votes (many snatched from Syriza). But the leader of Pasok, intercepted until last summer by the government of Nea Demokratia, did not want to know anyway; and Mitsotakis doesn’t want it. Better not to find an agreement and go back to voting in the “second round”, a new election already almost set 25 days after the consultations will be declared failed, i.e. on June 25 or July 2. Rewin by acclaim. And with the new electoral law, which assigns the winner a more decisive majority prize: if Mitsotakis takes yesterday’s votes in July, he will be entitled to so many deputies that he would not need to consult anyone, pasha “with full powers” of a single-colored granite sky blue.
Wait no more. Less enthusiastic about the impending political paralysis they are international investors: this is the first Greek election in which the country is no longer the special observer of Europe, but the bets of the markets against the Greek debt have reached the maximum since 2014. Instead, it is probable that the expressed wish will come true – and it has gone viral in a video circulating online — by 98-year-old Stratis Tsourakis, a Cretan voter who said ‘I hope to vote again’.
Moreover, yesterday’s results exclude the – already outlandish – hypothesis of a centre-left coalition between Pasok and Syriza, the party of the former prime minister Alexis Tsipras, who promised early yesterday morning “starting tomorrow we will change, we will leave behind four years of inequality”. In theory it would also have been possible: if the consultations led by Mitsotakis fail, the President of the Republic can entrust the runner-up, i.e. Alexis Tsipras, with the task of forming a government. But Syriza’s 71 seats added to Pasok’s 41 still make 112, far from an absolute majority.
In the almost empty headquarters of Syriza, already in the afternoon there was an air of disarmament. The headquarters are in Piazza Libertà, in the battered heart of the capital (while Mitsotakis’ office looks at the sea and the new pharaonic regulatory plan which envisages a navy of Emirate-style skyscrapers). «I think the polls are lying», insisted a militant in a T-shirt, Kostas, «a member of Syriza since 2004 so I’ve seen them all. Today’s economic growth is also due to the economic policies that Tsipras wanted after 2015. People must acknowledge this. This time we can’t not win». And instead.
“Greek polls have a reputation for being unreliable,” explains Dora Antoniou, a political commentator who has been following Greek governments for the main national newspaper for two decades. Kathimerini. “but since 2019, since it went into opposition, the Syriza party has never surpassed Nea Demokratia even for a week”. The polls gave them below 6% fixed. It got even worse. «People did not forgive Tsipras 2015. They had won the election by promising to resist the troika. They capitulated on everything, and we all had to grit our teeth». At the time, following the executive meant «living with a suitcase in hand. Brussels, Rome, Paris, Berlin, Brussels again. My dream job, but I was terrified. We went around with bags of cash: the cards were frozen. We took 60 euros from the bank every day, the maximum, and we lent it to each other».
Isn’t today’s growth also due to this austerity? “There is debate. He said in 2019: I’ll leave a budget surplus of 30 billion to the next government. People hated him even more: he felt unfairly squeezed. Plus he shoots them big, he claims moral superiority. He says the Mitsotakis years are the worst since the colonels. Honestly, the crisis years were a little worse.’
Finally, on the left, the socialist party Pasok is doing well, after years in which “pasokificarsi” had become, in the political lexicon, synonymous with “disappear”. The communists of the Kke also do well (above 7%). MeRa25, the team founded by the economist Yanis Varoufakis, dances on 2.6%, i.e. below the threshold. The last ballots, during the night, will decide whether – of the crisis season – to archive him too.