Voting takes place in Greece – Il Post

General elections are held in Greece on Sunday. The current Greek government is led by New Democracy, a conservative and centre-right party. According to the calculations of the experts, a party that wants to govern alone will have to get at least 46 percent of the vote. If it doesn’t happen, as many predict, there will be negotiations to try to form a coalition government. But even this perspective seems politically complicated: if the negotiations are not successful in July, the second round of the elections will be held, but there will be a new electoral system, different from that of the first round and which could lead to more concrete results.

The electoral law with which to vote on Sunday is the one approved in 2016 by the then left-wing government led by Syriza, currently in opposition. It is a simple proportional system which has eliminated the majority premium of 50 seats for the first party and which aims to make majorities composed of a single party difficult: it provides for a threshold of 3 per cent and that in order to have a majority of 151 seats out of 300 in Parliament a party obtains at least 46 per cent support.

If no one obtains the majority, the President of the Republic appoints the leader of the party with the most votes to form a government. If within three days the first appointee fails to do so and renounces the mandate, it is up to the leader of the party that finished second and then, in the event of his failure, to the leader of the party that finished third. If no one manages to make agreements to form a coalition government, a second vote takes place, which in this case will be held in July (and in the meantime a caretaker government will be appointed).

However, another electoral system will apply to the eventual second round. After winning the elections in January 2020 New Democracy, which has always been a supporter of the majority premium, had approved a new electoral law to restore it, albeit with a different formula. This law, however, had been approved in 2020 by parliament with a simple majority and instead a majority of at least two thirds would have been needed for it to enter into force immediately. Its application date has therefore been postponed to the first successive elections after the first vote for the renewal of the parliament, therefore to the possible second round of the 2023 policies.

The electoral system wanted by New Democracy is a reinforced proportional system: if a party receives a percentage greater than or equal to 25 percent of the valid votes, then it will receive a bonus of 20 seats, while the remaining 280 seats will be assigned proportionally. From 25 percent onwards, the bonus increases, reaching a maximum of 50 seats if the party with the most votes gets at least 40 percent.

In 2019, the elections had been won by the center-right New Democracy, which had overtaken the left of Alexis Tsipras, Syriza, which had governed up to that moment. The result had allowed New Democracy to appoint its leader, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, as prime minister. Mitsotakis belongs to one of the richest and most powerful families in Greece. The Mitsotakis-Venizelos are in fact a dynasty of Greek shipowners who have already expressed three prime ministers, numerous ministers, parliamentarians and regional governors.

After graduating from Stanford in international relations, Mitsotakis worked as a consultant for a number of banks and other international financial firms, including the McKinsey consulting firm. In the early 2000s he had left the private sector to enter politics. In 2013 he was appointed minister of public administration reform in the government of Antonis Samaras, the one who had the difficult task of implementing the harsh austerity measures demanded by the International Monetary Fund and who was defeated by Syriza at the 2015 policies.

In 2015 Tsipras had promised the Greeks an end to the austerity measures and the renegotiation of the conditions imposed on the country by its creditors, after a very harsh economic crisis and a huge budget hole created by previous governments. During his mandate, however, Tsipras had shown a certain pragmatism, giving in to pressure from creditors and ending up accepting an international loan on terms almost as difficult as the previous ones. Tsipras later dismissed the then Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis from his government, opposed to any compromise with creditors, who had founded a new party.

The main parties that will stand in Sunday’s elections are New Democracy (ND) and Alexis Tsipras’ Syriza, who is still its leader. Syriza is the acronym of Synaspismós Rizospastikís Aristerás, which means Coalition of the Radical Left, but it has long since added Proodeftiki Symmachia, i.e. Progressive Alliance, to its name, with the aim of transforming itself into a political force that includes the entire left up to progressive center.

Then there are the Pasok socialists who have renewed their name by adding Kinima Allaghis (Movement for Change): their leader is Nikos Androulakis, considered a moderate. Followed by the communist KKE of Dimitris Koutsoumpas, the party of former Economy Minister Yanis Varoufakis, MeRA25, which means European Realistic Disobedience Front, and the far-right party Greek Solution (EL), which entered parliament in 2019 and heir of Golden Dawn.

A few weeks ago, however, the country’s Supreme Court blocked the participation in the elections of the National Party – The Greeks, founded by Ilias Kasidiaris, a former deputy and spokesman for Golden Dawn, and two other small far-right parties created by former deputies of New Democracy.

Polls say New Democracy is ahead. Second EuropeElectswhich provides the average of national polls, the current ruling party could win 36.6 percent of the vote in the first round, followed by Syriza with 29.5 percent and Pasok with 10.3 percent.

“Don’t look at the polls,” Alexis Tsipras said recently from Thessaloniki, insisting that it is unrealistic that the ruling party has seen its support steadily rise after the 1 March train crash in which 57 people died. After the accident, large protests were organized in several cities of the country against the poor state of infrastructure, the shortage of personnel and the sell-off of the railways and the railway maintenance company to individuals. Among other things, Alexis Tsipras had chosen Larissa, the city of the railway accident, for one of his rallies: and there he had defined the government of Prime Minister Mitsotakis as “the fiercest face of neoliberalism”.

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It is not the first time that the Greek polling system has come into question. According to some analysts, the problem is structural: the methodology focuses mainly on telephone interviews and the institutes, as a result, are unable to identify the youngest and most progressive voters and women.

There will be more than 430,000 people between the ages of 16 and 21 who will vote for the first time on Sunday important moment of their politicization was precisely the recent railway accident: not only for the seriousness of the accident, but also because many of the people who died were young students. It was also seen as a joke that Transport Minister Kostas Karamanlis had resigned but then re-run for New Democracy.

In general, all parties are trying to get the vote of young people and their leaders are very active on social media, especially on TikTok. For example, Mitsotakis has announced that he will give young people aged 18 and 19 a bonus of 150 euros to spend on culture or tourism. And Alexis Tsipras has said that if he wins, his first legislative act will be to facilitate access to university by eliminating a series of minimum requirements.

In some newspapers they circulate however polls showing neck-and-neck between New Democracy and Syriza; however all projections say that it is unlikely that either of the two main parties will reach the threshold necessary to form a one-party government. In view of this result and therefore of the need to make alliances, however, it is not clear how things will go. Syriza has said it aims to form a progressive coalition with the socialists, but that may not be enough. And relations between Tsipras and Varoufakis have been very tense for some time.

Pasok has not yet spelled out what it intends to do, although its electoral program is ideally closer to that of Syriza than that of New Democracy. Relations with New Democracy then worsened after the wiretapping scandal of 2022, when the socialist leader Androulakis had denounced that he had been wiretapped for months by the Greek secret services which, precisely by choice of Mitsotakis, had been placed under the direct control of the prime minister’s office. Finally, any coalition between New Democracy and Syriza is naturally excluded.

Mitsotakis aims to obtain a second mandate, but according to many newspapers he is already aiming for the second round which, with the strengthened proportional system, could give him more chances of being able to govern alone. The outgoing prime minister maintains that outside his own party there is “absolute chaos”, he says he wants “a stable government, a government that can make decisions and that is not at the mercy of bargaining and blackmail within the parties”.

In the electoral campaign, the prime minister put the economy at the center, claiming the results obtained in recent years.

Indeed, Greece has grown economically, foreign investments and exports have increased. Mitsotakis reduced company taxes and also carried out a major liberalization of the labor market, which however according to the unions would have led to a significant increase in temporary contracts and temporary agencies, which would have compromised not only the level of wages, but also the security. Tsipras argues that this financial recovery has not changed the daily life of citizens: the purchasing power of the Greeks would not have increased, internal demand would have remained low, services and the rights of male and female workers would not have improved.

The other major issue at the center of the electoral campaign is the country’s reception policies. With the upcoming elections, he wrote for example Politico, Greek voters and electors will decide whether to confirm and strengthen the hard line adopted so far by the government with migrants or whether to favor the main opposition party which instead has a softer position. Mitsotakis, who is among other things trying to recover votes from the far right, has announced the extension of the wall built along the entire border that separates Greece from Turkey by 2026. During his mandate he was repeatedly accused by observers of having carried out illegal pushbacks of migrants.

Tsipras, on the other hand, thinks that extending the wall is not a solution: «The immigration issue will not be resolved with fences. Where there are, that there are, but the question will be resolved with a different claim at the European level”.