• TERESA ABURTO

    Special Envoy

    @TeresaAburto

    Athens

Updated Monday,22May2023-18:04

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  • Elections Conservative Mitsotakis wins sweeping victory in Greek elections
  • Resentment against Tsipras divides Greek opposition: "Syriza is no longer a left party, it represents the interests of the rich"

The polls spoke loud and clear: Greek society has overcome the crisis and wants to leave behind the era of extremes. The comfortable victory this Sunday of the conservative Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, surprised but not as much as the great defeat of an Alexis Tsipras who trusted until the last moment that Greece would end up at the polls "with the nightmare of the regime of injustices" of New Democracy (ND). Shortly after the polls closed, with a political map tinted blue, the Syriza leader could only acknowledge: "Fights have winners and losers."

With a difference between the winner and the losers of 20 points, when the pre-election polls predicted a difference of only 7 points, the Greeks have not only made it clear that they do not want Syriza in government, but that they are also not convinced in the opposition. And that is where the historic Socialist Party PASOK – the other great winner of the elections – comes back into play, which Syriza ousted in 2012 with its populist discourse in the midst of the economic crisis. With 11% of the vote (the polls did not give them more than 8 points) PASOK aspires to recover the center-left voter and become again the other pole of the Greek political ecosystem together with New Democracy. After the election, party leader Nikos Androulakis appealed to voters to "strengthen ND's true and genuine opponent," a statement hinting that the most favorable scenario for socialists is a repeat election to try to eat even more ground into Syriza.

One of the slogans most repeated by Androulakis during the campaign is that "Tsipras is Mitsotakis' biggest backer," meaning that Syriza only exists to confront conservatives, but that it does not represent a real leadership option. The truth is that Tsipras has used for these elections the same strategy that gave him the victory in 2015: a polarizing discourse, with darts against the middle class and aggressive personal attacks on Mitsotakis, whom he has compared to the Hungarian leader, Viktor Orban, for measures such as the Evros wall, on the Turkish border. with which the majority of parties and Ciudadanos agreed and which has reduced migratory flows by 90%, taking the debate off the agenda.

Syriza has even gone so far as to wink at the orphaned voters of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party, outlawed in 2020, and its heirs of Greeks for the Fatherland, banned from elections by justice. His exclusion represented another symbol of the rejection of extremes in the new post-crisis Greece, as well as the fact that MeRA25, the anti-EU and anti-NATO party of Yanis Varoufakis, has been left out of Parliament by not reaching the necessary 3% of the vote. Tsipras has also been rejected by young people, who confronted the government after the Tempe train tragedy, and to whom the Syriza leader made repeated appeals to bet on his party as a "punishment vote" for Mitsotakis. The new generations have however preferred the left of the Communist Party KKE, which won the student elections last week and on Sunday garnered 7.3% of the vote.

Mitsotakis, who for this campaign has opted for a positive discourse focused on stability with a view to the future, has weathered three crises during his first government: migration, Covid and energy arising from the war in Ukraine. And, given the election result, Greeks have approved their administrative efficiency and economic management over scandals. "Greece is a very different country from 2015 in which the speeches of that time are no longer valid. People want progress and solutions to the problems we still have: wages are not high and there is inflation; the administration does not work well, you need a modernization of the public sector and have the feeling that the country adapts to the needs of a future that is already here, "analyzes Ino Afentouli, director of the Greek Institute of International Relations.

The premier began the countdown on Sunday to achieve his goal: "a self-sufficient government", which will be easy to obtain with a second election, scheduled for the end of June, in which the electoral law that gives 50 extra seats to the winner will be restored, which will reach an absolute majority. This morning, Mitsotakis communicated to the president of the country, Katerina Sakellaropoulo, his intention not to exhaust the three days of exploratory mandate established by law and return it this afternoon to accelerate the process. The premier hopes that both Tsipras and Androulakis will also return their mandates as soon as possible and the process of calling elections will be opened.

With the backing of a new government, Mitsotakis – the first head of state to be re-elected after the crisis – Greece has returned to the path of traditional politics occupied by conservatives and socialists before the emergence of Syriza, which will now have to seek its space again, if it still has it. "In Greece we still remember the crisis because it was not so long ago, but we prefer to forget those years because they were very hard. We are an extroverted society, we do not like to be in crisis. I believe that this period has, however, brought a wave of solidarity with Greece; Europeans sympathize with us, come for tourism and promote the country. The brutal attack on Greece, especially by the German press, was turned around, because after all we are not the worst country. We did not commit a crime, it was not the fault of the Greek people," concludes Afentouli.

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