Greek PM Urges Voter Turnout Ahead of Sunday Elections

By Brillian Bao

ATHENS — Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras spoke to a crowd of more than 1,000 supporters at his final campaign rally Thursday night in Syntagma Square. Over the course of an hour, the prime minister urged those in attendance to vote in Sunday’s national elections, which many opinion polls have projected the prime minister will lose.

Tsipras, who heads Greece’s leftist Syriza party, was elected in 2015 at the height of the country’s financial crisis. Running on a pledge to oppose the severe austerity terms set by Greece’s lenders in return for two international bailouts totaling more than 240 billion euros, Tspiras and his party won 149 of the 300 seats in parliament, just two short of the number needed to govern alone.

But that support quickly faded. Just seven months after the election, Tsipras negotiated a third harsh international bailout deal to avoid an imminent default. Though the measure passed, sixty-one percent of Greeks voted against the bailout and nearly one-third of Syriza’s members of parliament either voted against the deal or abstained. Tsipras resigned in response, prompting Greece’s fifth general election in six years.

While he ultimately won the September snap elections and survived five subsequent no-confidence votes in parliament, Tsipras is projected to lose his bid for reelection on Sunday. In addition to receiving criticism for the third bailout, the prime minister has also lost popularity for signing a controversial agreement resolving a name dispute with North Macedonia and for his absence following a series of devastating wildfires near Athens that killed more than 100 people last year. And though Tsipras, who once pledged to lead Greece out of its financial crisis by 2019, has overseen some economic recovery, unemployment is still at 18% and economic growth remains low at 2% per year.

Though his government’s term was set to end in October, Tsipras again called snap national elections after his party lost the European Parliament election in May to New Democracy, the center-right opposition party, by 9.3 percentage points. These results and recent polls indicate that New Democracy head Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who delivered his final campaign rally Thursday night, will become the next prime minister.

Mitsotakis, a Harvard- and Stanford-educated former McKinsey consultant, comes from a family of politicians: he is the son of former prime minister Konstantinos Mitsotakis, brother of former Athens mayor and former Greek minister Dora Bakoyannis, and uncle of recently-elected Athens mayor Kostas Bakoyannis.

Tsipras has campaigned on the promise of 500,000 new jobs over the next four years, increases in the monthly minimum wage and tax relief for those most affected by the financial crisis, while Mitsotakis has pledged to cut bailout taxes, heightened security at Greece’s borders and to institute a 2000-euro handout for each newborn.

Five other political parties will also participate in Sunday’s election. Parties must receive at least 3% of all votes to gain seats in parliament. Though voting is mandatory in Greece, only a fraction of the nearly 10 million eligible voters in the country is expected to cast a ballot.