Greece’s conservative New Democracy party stormed to victory in a parliamentary election on Sunday, early official results showed, with voters giving reformist Kyriakos Mitsotakis another four-year term as prime minister. With about a quarter of votes counted, centre-right New Democracy was leading with 40.5 percent of the vote, interior ministry figures showed. It was more than 20 points clear of Syriza, a radical leftist party which won elections in 2015 at the peak of a debilitating debt crisis and which ran the country until 2019, when it lost to New Democracy.
“Obviously this is a great defeat,” Euclid Tsakalotos, who was finance minister under the Syriza administration, told Greece’s Skai TV. Sunday’s vote is the second in the past five weeks, as a first poll on May 21, held under a different electoral system, failed to give a single party absolute majority in the 300-seat parliament. The system used in Sunday’s poll gives the leading party bonus seats depending on voter support.—Agencies
