Athens: Greece’s conservative prime minister-elect Kyriakos Mitsotakis vowed that the country would “proudly” enter a post-bailout period of “jobs, security and growth” after winning a landslide victory in Sunday’s general election.
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Official results showed Mitsotakis on track to crush leftist premier Alexis Tsipras, who oversaw austerity meausures after Greece’s dramatic rescue by international creditors in the European debt crisis.
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“A painful cycle has closed,” Mitsotakis said in a televised address, adding that Greece would “proudly raise its head again” on his watch.
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“I will not fail to honour your hopes,” he said as early congratulation calls came from outgoing European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
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Early results from nearly 80 percent of polling stations showed New Democracy scoring a crushing victory by nearly 40 percent – its best score in over a decade – to over 31 percent for Tsipras’s leftist Syriza party.
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“I want to see this people prosper. I want to see the children who left to return,” he later told party supporters.
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Mitsotakis will be sworn in as Greece’s new prime minister on Monday.
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Tsipras had earlier admitted defeat after over four years in power that saw Greece emerge from its third bailout.
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The 44-year-old warned that his Syriza party would “dynamically” resist efforts to scale back the party’s pro-labour reforms.
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If the results are confirmed, the 51-year-old Harvard graduate and former McKinsey consultant Mitsotakis will have a majority of 158 lawmakers in the 300-seat parliament. Tsipras’s party will have 86 seats.
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The final number will depend on how smaller parties fare. They need at least 3.0 percent of the vote to enter parliament.
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A family affair
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New Democracy was last in power in 2014, in coalition with the Greek socialists.
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Mitsotakis is a scion of one of Greece’s top political families.
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He is the son of former prime minister Constantine Mitsotakis, one of the country’s longest-serving parliamentarians.
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His sister is former minister Dora Bakoyannis, Athens’s first female mayor. And new Athens mayor Costas Bakoyannis, elected in May, is his nephew.
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Sunday’s election was Greece’s third in as many months, and the first held in midsummer since 1928.
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In May, New Democracy beat Syriza by nearly 9.5 points in European parliament elections. A week later, it completed a near-sweep of Greek regions in local elections.
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After that, Tsipras was forced to call an early general election. His term was scheduled to end in the autumn.
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‘Chance to recover’
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Greece’s youngest premier in more than a century, Tsipras had trailed in the polls for months amid widespread dissatisfaction over high taxes.
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“Greece is exiting 10 years of crisis and the new government will have the heavy task to give a chance to the country to recover completely or to sink”, 36-year-old Aphrodite told AFP, as she cast her vote in the bohemian downtown Athens neighborhood of Exarcheia.
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“I hope that from tomorrow we will be able to breathe with relief. To take a deep breath, if Mitsotakis does what he promises,” added Athinodoros, a 48-year-old self-employed worker.
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Tsipras has accused Mitsotakis – who was part of a 2012-2014 crisis government – of “disastrous” mismanagement that brought hundreds of thousands of job losses and business failures.
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Mitsotakis has now pledged to create “better” jobs through growth, foreign investment and tax cuts and to “steamroll” obstacles to business.
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Tsipras – who reduced unemployment and raised the minimum wage for the first time since 2012 – was criticised for campaigning as an anti-austerity crusader before eventually accepting a third EU bailout and the economic cutbacks that entailed.
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In parts of the country, there was also a backlash against a controversial agreement with North Macedonia that ended a bitter 27-year dispute over the country’s name.
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New parties
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The new smaller parties fighting to secure representation are Greek Solution, a nationalist party formed by TV salesman Kyriakos Velopoulos, and MeRA25, an anti-austerity party founded by maverick economist and former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis.
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According to the exit polls, Varoufakis’s party could elect nine lawmakers.
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Greek Solution could end up with 10 deputies, while neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn looks likely to be shut out of parliament for the first time since 2012.
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Golden Dawn, until recently Greece’s third-ranking party, is in steep decline amid an ongoing trial for the 2013 murder of an anti-fascist rapper, allegedly carried out with the knowledge of senior Golden Dawn members.
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Mitsotakis has promised to hit the ground running. A Eurogroup finance meeting on Monday will convene to discuss the state of Greece’s economy after tax cuts rolled out by Tsipras in May.
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