A snap election in Greece over the weekend has seen the centre-right New Democracy party emerge triumphant once again.
Although an election had been held in May, the Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, called another election this month as his New Democracy party narrowly missed out on a majority. Not wanting to govern in coalition, Mitsotakis called another election. The gamble paid off.
New Democracy won 158 of the 300 seats, an increase of 12 on last month’s election, meaning that his party will be able to govern without the assistance of other parties.
New Democracy benefited from a tweak made to the Greek electoral system for this election, where the largest party gets a ‘bonus’ number of seats, depending on its overall vote share. This had been done in previous elections, but had been abolished before being reintroduced for this election. The aim is to reduce the instability which comes with proportional representation systems.
The hard-left Syriza party, which governed Greece from 2015 to 2019, was the second-biggest party, with 17.8% of the vote and 48 seats.
The only other party to win more than 10% of the vote was the centre left PASOK-Movement for Change, which secured 32 seats and 11.9% of the vote.
A number of new parties entered the Greek parliament for the first time, including the hard-right Spartans party, which won 4.6% of the vote and 12 seats.
After his election victory, Mitsotakis was quoted as saying: ‘The people have given us a secure majority. Major reforms will go ahead with speed.