Conservative Greek PM Mitsotakis Secures Second Term With Thumping Majority
Kyriakos Mitsotakis secured a clear parliamentary majority and won a second four-year term as Prime Minister of Greece on Sunday.
Conservative leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis secured a clear parliamentary majority and won a second four-year term as Prime Minister of Greece on Sunday. Mitsotakis´s New Democracy party secured over 40 percent of the vote, well ahead of former Greece prime minister Alexis Tsiprasleftist’s Syriza party, which managed under 18 percent, according to over 90 percent of the ballot counted, as reported by the news agency AFP.
The margin is the widest for the conservatives in almost 50 years. After securing a clear majority and registering a win in the elections, Mitsotakis said that the people have given his party a safe majority and now major reforms will proceed rapidly. “The people have given us a safe majority. Major reforms will proceed rapidly,” Mitsotakis said, as quoted by AFP. He further stated that he had “ambitious” targets for a new term that could “transform” Greece.
The 55-year-old Harvard graduate had already scored a thumping win in an election just a month ago. But having fallen short by five seats in the parliament of being able to form a single-party government, he refused to try to form a coalition, in effect forcing 9.8 million Greek voters back to the ballot boxes.
The radical-left MeRA25 party of former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis´s failed to make it past the three percent threshold to get into parliament, while Tsipras´s party scored even less than in May, losing a further 300,000 votes, as reported by AFP. With the strong swing to the right -- including the arrival of three hard-right parties in parliament -- Varoufakis said his left-wing party would be sorely missed in parliament.
Mitsotakis became prime minister in 2019 when he defeated his predecessor Tsipras on a vow to move on from a decade of economic crisis.
That election was the first in the EU nation´s post-bailout era when businesses and workers were ailing under the burden of heavy taxes imposed by Syriza to build a budget surplus demanded by international creditors. Over the next four years, tax burdens were eased, and while the Covid-19 pandemic wiped out Greece´s vital tourism revenues, the country has since bounced back strongly with growth of 8.3 percent in 2021 and 5.9 percent last year.
That was helped in part by over 57 billion euros ($62 billion) dished out by the government to cushion the impact of the health crisis and inflation. Mitsotakis also had a licence to spend more under the EU´s more relaxed pandemic-era rules. According to AFP, he has played up Greece´s newfound economic health in his re-election bid, saying his conservatives have cut 50 taxes while increasing national output by 29 billion euros and overseeing the largest infrastructure upgrades since 1975.
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