Did the outcome of the Greek elections make the situation even more complicated?

Dear reader,

This is our weekly round-up from Greece.

ND achieved a historic victory in the Greek election, leaving SYRIZA behind with a larger than 20% margin. This shocked SYRIZA, but it was unexpected even by ND, who might now have fallen short of the majority needed to form a government, yet it could be easily achieved in the second elections. Five parties entered Parliament, with DiEM25 not being one of them.

It was like people applauded the ND government, despite the disastrous handling of the pandemic, and the numerous scandals, including the Greek Watergate, the disastrous Evia wildfires management, the Tempi crash, and countless other blunders. How can this result be explained?

What could happen in the second election? What next for Greek democracy as a new political landscape is being configured? 

An unexpected result

When we wrote in our previous newsletter that these elections would be unpredictable, we did not expect this kind of ‘unpredictable’ - a swiping ND victory. We would instead have anticipated the two big parties to end up with a narrower margin and some smaller parties to take a more significant percentage of the vote. 

Well, we were wrong, like everyone in Greece.  The results (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) of a 300-seat Parliament are as follows:

ND: 40,79% and 145 seats

SYRIZA: 20,07% and 72 seats

PASOK - KINAL: 11,45% and 41 seats

Communist Party KKE: 7,23% and 26 seats

Greek Solution: 4,45% and 16 seats

The opinion polls also did not predict this. Leading opinion polling companies claimed (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) they did detect the trends that led to New Democracy’s triumph over Syriza in Sunday’s elections but avoided publishing the results because of the “severe criticism” main opposition Syriza subjected to them. If this claim is valid, then the companies admitted to intentionally misleading the public. 

Seats are currently allocated by a simple proportional representation system, legislated by SYRIZA before it fell from power in 2019, yet a 3% threshold for parliament has been kept in place. This threshold leaves out of the Parliament Yanis Varoufakis’s party DiEM25 which took 2.61%. Surprisingly, ex-Parliament President under SYRIZA Zoe Konstantopoulou’s party Plefsi Eleftherias got 2.88%, while a party no one had heard of before, Niki, gained 2.92%. Niki appears as a far-right religious party.

All parties that do not enter the Parliament collected a considerable 16%. 

Participation was 60%, disqualified votes were 2%, and blank votes counted for 0.5%. 

To see how Greeks abroad voted, read here (Öffnet in neuem Fenster). 

It is pretty illustrative that New Democracy won 58 out of 59 constituencies -apart from Rodopi, Northern Greece- and the electoral map became blue. Even traditionally socialist strongholds like the island of Crete turned all blue. 

Under this proportional representation system, Mitsotakis’s ruling party fell five seats shy of the 151 seats in the 300-seat legislative chamber needed to govern again.

However, New Democracy passed a new electoral law, which restores seat bonuses to the winning party. But under the constitution, changes to electoral law can only take effect in the second election after the legislative change, so no party can manipulate the system to remain in power indefinitely.

“We have not seen such a defeat of a main opposition party since 1977,” Constitutional Law professor Kostas Chrysogonos told (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) Mega TV, referring to the then-party Enosis Kentrou. SYRIZA lost some 600,000 voters compared to 2019 - SYRIZA got 31% in 2019 with 1,780,000 and is now at 20% with 1,180,000 votes. 

That is, SYRIZA has more than a 20% gap with ND. The ruling party, despite the disastrous handling of the pandemic with people dying intubated outside ICUs and the authoritative measures, despite all the scandals including the ‘Greek Watergate,’ the wildfires in Evia, the Tempi train crash, the soaring living cost, and many more, not only retained its electorate base but won an extra 150,000 votes.  

A ‘mystery’ seeks an explanation.

The situation is quite polarized. Some citizens state on social media that they want to leave the country, yet many Greek citizens voted for this government. As simple as that.   

In an attempt to shed some light on what caused people to vote like that, it seems more of a deafening SYRIZA defeat than an ND victory - without annulling the latter.   

In 2010, SYRIZA was a small leftist party concentrating 3-5% of the vote. Then the crisis started, and the colossal surprise came in 2012 when SYRIZA was elected as the main opposition party. Yet, it was the 2011 anti-memorandum squares movement that had sent SYRIZA into Parliament with force. To cut a long story short, SYRIZA was elected into power in 2015, but then, while people voted 61% NO to the referendum asking them whether they wanted the agreement with the Troika in force, SYRIZA turned NO into YES and then passed the Third Memorandum from Parliament.

It might seem a long time ago, but this was a watershed moment that sent all Greek Left to the dustbin of history for decades to come. Because at precisely that moment when people had believed there was an alternative, fought for it, and appointed SYRIZA in power to enforce it, SYRIZA slapped them with TINA and went ahead applying neoliberal policies for which ND and PASOK had been outvoted. Plus, it kept and continued the clientele state, promoting now its’ ‘own’ kids on the block.