Kyriakos Mitsotakis took the oath of office again on Monday as Prime Minister of Greece.
(Photo: Reuters)
Athens Greece’s previous conservative Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis was given a clear mandate for a second term in the parliamentary elections on Sunday. He now wants to accelerate the pace of reform. On the other hand, the radical left-wing alliance Syriza led by Alexis Tsipras continued to plummet. Three ultra-right splinter parties achieved surprise successes.
Mitsotakis took the oath of office as the new prime minister on Monday in the presence of President Katerina Sakellaropoulou. With 40.6 percent of the votes cast, his conservative Nea Dimokratia (ND) clearly won the election on Sunday. She gets 158 of the 300 seats in the new parliament.
According to the new electoral law, the strongest party in each case receives a bonus of up to 50 of the 300 parliamentary seats. Mitsotakis, who has ruled the country since the summer of 2019, can continue his one-party government with this absolute majority.
In front of cheering supporters on Sunday evening, Mitsotakis spoke of a “strong mandate from voters to accelerate the course of the great changes this country needs”. After this election result, he felt “personally even more obliged to serve the country with all my abilities”.
The Harvard graduate and former investment banker Mitsotakis comes from one of the oldest political dynasties in the country. The family line goes back to the liberal statesman Eleftherios Venizelos (1864-1936), who is considered the most important politician in modern Greece. Mitsotakis’ father was prime minister in the 1990s, his sister was foreign minister, and his nephew is the mayor of Athens.
The re-elected Prime Minister does not want to waste any time now. “Tomorrow we will roll up our sleeves,” he said on election night. The new cabinet is to be sworn in as early as this Tuesday in order to meet for its first meeting on Wednesday. Mitsotakis wants to promote growth and facilitate investments with structural reforms.
Tax cuts and new minimum wage
He expects this to create new and better-paying jobs. The state minimum wage is to rise from 780 to 950 euros. The tasks that Mitsotakis wants to tackle in the next four years also include modernizing the state health system and reforming the judiciary to speed up the administration of justice. The Prime Minister promised further tax cuts, but at the same time wants to step up the fight against tax evasion, which is rampant in Greece.
One of the new government’s immediate goals is to bring Greece back into the ranks of investable debtors. The country lost this status in early 2010 at the start of the debt crisis. Analysts expect that after this election result, at least three major rating agencies will upgrade Greece to the coveted investment grade by the end of the year.
In this election, Mitsotakis benefited above all from the economic successes of his first term. The Greek economy grew by 5.9 percent last year, and by 8.3 percent in 2021. For this year, the government expects an increase of 2.3 percent.
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The country has also gained in stature in foreign policy under Mitsotakis. While Turkey is increasingly viewed critically in NATO because of its Russia-friendly policy, Greece’s importance as a politically stable security partner in south-eastern Europe is growing.
Is Tsipras’ political career ending?
It was the second general election in Greece in five weeks. The ND had already achieved almost 41 percent in the first round in mid-May, but just missed an absolute majority in parliament due to a different electoral law. Because it was not possible to form a government, a new election had to be held.
While Mitsotakis was able to maintain his election result from May, the radical-left alliance Syriza and its leader Alexis Tsipras continued to slide. Syriza fell below 18 percent from 20 percent five weeks ago. Tsipras, who ruled the country from 2015 to 2019 and had hoped for a return to power, spoke of a “serious defeat”. For him it is about his political future. It was Tsipras’ fifth lost election since 2019.
While the conservative ND now dominates the political arena, fragmentation continued on the left and right fringes of the political spectrum. The third strongest party was the social democratic Pasok with twelve percent, followed by the Communist Party with 7.7 percent.
The right-wing extremist party Spartans, a successor organization to the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn, which was banned in 2020, achieved a surprise success with 4.7 percent and twelve MPs. In total, far-right and ultra-religious parties account for 13 percent and 34 seats in the new parliament.
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