ATHENS, Greece — For the first time in more than a decade, Greeks will go to the polls on Sunday to elect a leader no longer limited to running the country’s economy from behind the scenes.
Conservative Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis is seeking a second term after a draconian regime of spending controls ordered by international bailout lenders expired last summer.
The well-groomed Harvard graduate, who speaks English as well as his native Greek, has fueled better-than-expected growth, a sharp drop in unemployment and a country poised to return to investment grade in the global bond market .
Debts to the International Monetary Fund were repaid early.
A landslide re-election of 55-year-old Mitsotakis was once considered a foregone conclusion. But his centre-right New Democracy party may be struggling to return to power while Greece’s voters and political parties emerge from a long struggle for survival.
On an unseasonably hot day in central Athens, taxi driver Christina Messari waited patiently in stop-start traffic near the Greek Parliament, where tourists roll bags around giant crimson banners unfurled by the Greek Communist Party for its most important election rally.
“The last four years have been like looking at a heart monitor: up and down… when business gets better, prices go up, so you stay in the same place,” said the 49-year-old.
European governments and the IMF pumped 280 billion euros ($300 billion) into the Greek economy between 2010 and 2018 to avert the euro-member’s bankruptcy. In return, they demanded punitive austerity measures and reforms.
A deep recession and years of emergency borrowing left Greece with a whopping €400 billion in public debt last December, surging household incomes that will likely take another decade to recover.
After the political and economic turmoil of the bailouts, ordinary Greeks were exhausted and plunged into personal debt, low wages and job insecurity.
Messari lost her bakery business during the crisis before joining her husband as a taxi driver. To make ends meet, they switched to parcel delivery during the pandemic lockdowns.
“I think things have to change so that people can live with dignity and not just work to meet basic expenses and pay taxes,” she said.
Mitsotakis lost a long-standing double-digit lead in opinion polls after a February 28 train accident that killed 57 people, including many university students.
A passenger train crashed into an oncoming freight train that was wrongly standing on the same track in northern Greece. Later it turned out that the stations were poorly staffed and the security infrastructure was broken and outdated.
The European Parliament is also investigating an unclear surveillance scandal after prominent Greek politicians and journalists discovered spyware on their cell phones. The revelations increased mistrust among the country’s political parties at a time when consensus may be badly needed.
Six political parties are in the process of being represented nationwide, from NATO-sceptical nationalists to a Communist Party voicing its admiration for the Soviet Union 32 years after its collapse.
The far-right Greek party, founded by a jailed former MP with a past of neo-Nazi activities, has been banned from participating by the Supreme Court.
The opposition is headed by 48-year-old Alexis Tsipras, a former prime minister and hot-headed leader of the left-wing Syriza party. His election campaign focused heavily on the rail disaster and the wiretapping scandal.
Opinion polls suggest Sunday’s election will not produce an outright winner under the newly introduced proportional representation system. A second election may be required in early July, in which the system would revert to one that favors the winning party with a bonus seat in Parliament.
Even then, recent polling data suggests Mitsotakis may be forced into a coalition, with the once-powerful socialist Pasok party — which nearly disappeared during the crisis — possibly holding the balance of power.
“We don’t have a consensus culture in our political system, it’s more of a zero-sum culture: if you lose, I win,” says Thodoris Georgakopoulos, Editor-in-Chief of diaNEOsis, an independent think tank in Athens.
Greece, he argued, has a rare opportunity to advance bipartisan decision-making as the three main political parties, Nea Dimokratia, Syriza and Pasok, all publicly pledge to fiscal responsibility and deeper integration with the European Union.
A grace period with relatively low annual repayment bills for bailout loans will last another ten years, he said: “By then we must have found a new production model for the country.”
He added: “We have postponed many of our most important reforms in the justice system, in education and in the health sector until the end because they will be the most difficult. The challenge in these elections will be to find the necessary consensus among the country’s political forces to carry out these very difficult reforms.”
More than 9.8 million Greeks are eligible to vote for 300 MPs in the unicameral four-year parliament in Sunday’s general election. The voting age will be lowered to 17 for the first time and Greek citizens living abroad will be allowed to vote in their country of residence for the first time.
Polling stations in 22,000 constituencies will open at 7am (4am GMT) and remain open for 12 hours. The Ministry of the Interior assumes that 80% of the votes will have been counted by 10 p.m
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