Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the leader of Greece’s New Democracy party aiming for a second term in office, is on a roll. The momentum is his, the polls are looking good, and, if anything, the opposition appears assured of only one thing in the general election on Sunday: defeat.
Five weeks after more than 6 million voters gave his centre-right party a stunning 20-point victory over Syriza, the leftwing movement that stormed to power at the height of Greece’s economic crisis, the electorate is poised to repeat the result – only this time under legislation that favours the winner.
All agree it’s a ballot that is Mitsotakis’s to lose. Opinion polls on Friday showed him heading not only towards a landslide in the repeat race but a comfortable parliamentary majority afforded by an electoral law that rewards the victor with up to 50 bonus seats.
The sense of deja vu comes days after a devastating shipwreck left more than 80 people dead and hundreds missing off the Peloponnese – a disaster that has raised awkward questions over the response of a coastguard frequently accused under Mitsotakis’s watch of repelling boats carrying asylum seekers from Greek waters.
But neither that nor a train crash in February have dented his lead, even if the head-on collision of a freight and passenger train would go down as the country’s worst-ever rail accident, claiming the lives of 57 people – including many students – and sparking furious protests nationwide.
“The latest disaster has not been a gamechanger. Its effect [on the campaign] has been precisely zilch,” said Maria Karaklioumi, a political analyst at the polling company Rass. “Voters are thinking rationally. There’s a lot of self-interest at play and again and again we see them asking: ‘Who will benefit me more?’”
In Mitsotakis, the scion of a political dynasty whose father, Constantine, was prime minister in the early 90s, Greeks had discovered “a good administrator”, she said, who had overseen the debt-burdened country’s return to economic growth, brought down unemployment and reduced taxes – the byproducts of gruelling austerity demanded in return for gargantuan EU-IMF rescue packages to stave off bankruptcy.
“Voters have opted for economic security,” noted Karaklioumi. “They want normality. Under Mitsotakis the economy has stabilised.”
By contrast, Syriza’s time in office between January 2015 and July 2019 had proved to be “full of surprises”, she said, recalling the knife-edge referendum its leader, Alexis Tsipras, had called over bailout conditions. “People don’t want any more surprises. They’re looking for solutions now,” she added.
Diehard leftists, though appalled by what they see as Mitsotakis’s “illiberal” handling of migration and the media, in many ways agree. Strongholds traditionally associated with the left turned blue in May in a change of voter behaviour that stunned pollsters, including in low-income areas of Athens as well as on the island of Crete, a longtime bastion of socialist support.
“This time I think it’s safe to say we’ll win with an even bigger margin,” beamed Vangelis Apostolides, who heads the local New Democracy branch in the nearby Argo-Saronic isle of Aegina. “We won big time here in May and this is a place that is popular with leftists. Lots of Syriza [ex-]ministers have homes on Aegina but I know of lots of people who are leaving other parties to back New Democracy because they want to be on the side of the winner.”
Analysts attributed the about-turn to Mitsotakis, who represents the liberal strand of a party whose views range from ultra-nationalist to centre-right, successfully reaching out to moderates seeking results-oriented policies.
“We have to admit that we failed to offer a vision,” lamented one veteran leftist who was tortured for his beliefs during the eight years of rightwing military rule that preceded Greece’s return to democracy in 1974. “In opposition Syriza had adopted this strategy of negativity, homing in on scandals and attacking Mitsotakis and his wife personally. People weren’t interested. We have a brain drain: thousands of our youngsters have left to find opportunity abroad. What people want is prospects.”
Tsipras, who turned Syriza from a small party on the margins of Greek life into a major political force, is acknowledged to be fighting for his political survival, with a resurgent social-democratic Pasok vying to replace his party as the main opposition.
In a campaign focused on rehabilitating the welfare state, the 48-year-old politician has repeatedly raised the spectre of an “all-powerful” right endangering accepted democratic norms if, in the absence of an effective opposition, Mitsotakis is given free rein.
But while Sunday’s outcome is viewed as a foregone conclusion, the size of the government’s majority will also be key if political headwinds are to be avoided, insists Prof Kevin Featherstone, the director of the Hellenic Observatory in the European Institute at the London School of Economics.
“Anything less than 158 seats [in the 300-seat parliament] would be a personal blow and box him in amongst his party factions restraining the prospects for serious reform,” said Featherstone, referring to the “safe majority” Mitsotakis has said he needed to govern unhindered. “Anything more than 158 and the onus is on him to deliver.”
Greece’s reform progress, though “steady” under the previous government, had been more cautious than the Harvard-educated former banker’s “own personal inclinations”, Featherstone told the Guardian.
“His core supporters want him to be more ‘Kyriakos’, less hidebound by internal party politics. His place in history ultimately rests on what kind of ‘liberal’ he is,” he added, saying the emergence of an embarrassing phone-tapping scandal and Mitsotakis’s hardline stance on incoming refugees could yet test that legacy.
“His next term as PM is likely to be definitive in terms of his true political identity and stature.”
