Greek poll results point to conservative victory
Greece's conservative New Democracy party stormed to victory in a parliamentary election on Sunday, early official results showed, with voters giving reformist Kyriakos Mitsotakis another four-year term as prime minister. With about a quarter of votes counted, centre-right New Democracy was leading with 40.5 percent of the vote, interior ministry figures showed. It was more than 20 points clear of Syriza, a radical leftist party which won elections in 2015 at the peak of a debilitating debt crisis and which ran the country until 2019, when it lost to New Democracy. "Obviously this is a great defeat," Euclid Tsakalotos, who was finance minister under the Syriza administration, told Greece's Skai TV. Sunday's vote is the second in the past five weeks, as a first poll on May 21, held under a different electoral system, failed to give a single party absolute majority in the 300-seat parliament. The system used in Sunday's poll gives the leading party bonus seats depending on voter support. With 60 percent of the votes counted, Mitsotakis was likely to get 157 seats in the 300-seat parliament, interior ministry data showed. Mitsotakis, who was prime minister from 2019 until stepping down in favour of a caretaker premier following the inconclusive May vote, has vowed to push ahead with reforms to rebuild the country's credit rating after the debt crisis which wracked the nation for a decade. A former banker and scion of a powerful political family, Mitsotakis has promised to boost revenue from the vital tourist industry, create jobs and increase wages to near the European Union average. "Mitsotakis and New Democracy have been meeting the new social demands. They have done the necessary readjustments that people have been demanding from the political system, from the political parties, for us all to move ahead," New Democracy spokesman Akis Skertsos told ERT state TV. (Reuters)