Alexis Tsipras returned to office on Sunday night after Syriza won a clear victory in Greece’s second general election this year.
Advertisement
In a speech earlier on Sunday, Mr. Tsipras urged Greeks to opt for “a new four years of government that will fight for the dignity of the people….We are fighting for the great victory of the left in Greece and to maintain hope across Europe”.
With 80 percent of the ballots counted, Syriza has garnered 35.54 percent and 145 seats in parliament, while the conservative New Democracy party headed by Vanguelia Maimarakis, has obtained 28 percent of the vote and 75 seats, according to results released by the Interior Ministry.
Opinion polls conducted on Friday had put Mr Tsipras and Vangelis Meimarakis, his conservative rival, just half a percentage point apart.
Several European Union member states want Mr Tsipras and Mr Meimarakis to work together under a grand coalition – but this is something Syriza has ruled out entirely.
Olga Gerovassili said: “This will be a four-year term government with a strong parliamentary majority, which will implement the programme itpromised”.
It is the third time Greeks are voting this year, after an election that catapulted Tsipras and his Syriza party to power and a referendum in which voters backed him to spurn the terms of a bailout – only for him to agree to it anyway.
Many Greeks, like this voter, are calling for more unity in the government.
However, the result suggests Greeks are more anxious about leaving the euro – a likely effect of rejecting the bailout deal – than they are about Mr Tsipras’ political U-turn. It will therefore form a coalition with the Independent Greeks party.
“On the one hand, the Greek electorate voted in exactly the same government: In short, nothing changed”, said Stathis Kalyvas, a professor of politics at Yale University.
The vote ensured Europe’s most outspoken leftist leader would remain Greece’s dominant political figure, despite having been abandoned by party radicals last month after he caved in to demands for austerity to win a bailout from the euro zone. The far-right Golden Dawn was in third place with between 6.5 and 8 percent.
Independent Greeks, the junior coalition partner in Tsipras’s last government, was forecast to take 3.7%, exceeding the threshold to enter parliament.
The snap election was called after a number of hard-left Syriza MPs defected in August when Mr Tsipras agreed to a new €90 billion financial rescue package that included a series of tough economic reforms known as austerity measures.
Advertisement
Others said they appreciated that Tsipras had tried to get a better bailout deal for Greece, and his honesty in saying he didn’t achieve what he wanted in the troubled negotiations with European creditors.
