Candidates from the main parties voted during the morning of the general elections that take place this Sunday in Greece, among them the outgoing prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis. Leader of the center-right formation of New Democracy, Mitsotakis is the favorite to achieve victory in these elections, although the polls consider that it will be difficult for him to achieve an absolute majority, so he is very interested in calling a new appointment with the polls at the beginning of July. The vote would then take place with an electoral law different from the current one, which would make it easier for him to form a government on his own without having to reach uncomfortable pacts with the Socialists, as is the case now.
According to official data provided by the Ministry of the Interior, at 4:30 p.m. (three-thirty in the afternoon in Spain), when there were still two and a half hours left before the closing of the polling stations, 48.76% of the electorate had voted. Therefore, the final participation figure is expected to exceed that of the last general elections, held in 2019 with 57% participation. There were then two events that had a significant weight in the abstention: the fact that they were called in summer and the fatigue of the citizens before the recent other appointments with the polls.
Although it is not at all clear that they are going to promote the birth of an Executive, the elections are taking place normally and without the drama of previous years, when Greece seemed headed for the abyss due to the economic crisis. There were hardly any incidents in the polling stations, where there was generally a good flow of voters. At the door of the Sfittion street institute, located in a pleasant neighborhood in the center of Athens, many made plans for Sunday after depositing their ballot. There were those who chose to take advantage of the good spring weather to go to a bar to have an aperitif and others preferred to look for a tavern to have lunch with the family.
“Elections are always important to our lives, even if Greece no longer seems to be in danger of falling off a cliff, as it used to,” says Soteris, a middle-aged neighbor who turned out to vote with his wife and daughter. Teen. «I think that Mitsotakis could have done better, but the situation in the country is more positive than at the beginning of the legislature. That is why I have given him the vote, he needs another four years to continue working ». Dafne, a 19-year-old chemistry student who was participating for the first time in a legislative election, instead described the Mitsotakis government as “terrible”. She considers him responsible for the railway accident last February, in which 57 people died, mostly university students. “I have voted for the Greek Communist Party because young people have to fight for a society in which the important thing is people and not the profits of companies.”
The division of the left-wing electorate is precisely one of the big problems of Mitsotakis’ main rival, Alexis Tsipras, who was prime minister between 2015 and 2019. Added to the bad memory that his government left in a significant part of the Greeks is the range of options that progressives have. In addition to Syriza, Tsipras’s party, they can elect the communists, the Pasok socialists, the Mera25 formation, led by the controversial economist Yanis Varoufakis, and other minor political forces.
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