7th July, 2019
Greek voters cast their ballots on Sunday in the country’s first national election of the post-bailout era, with leftist Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’s Syriza party expected to be ousted by the conservative opposition.
After nearly five years in power, Greece’s longest-serving crisis premier — as well as the youngest in more than a century — is battling to overcome a 10-point deficit in opinion polls amid widespread dissatisfaction after years of high taxation.
Polling stations opened at 07.00 am local time (0400 GMT) and will close at 07.00 pm with 9,903,864 Greeks having the right to vote, according to the Athens News Agency.
With three new opinion polls predicting a clear victory for the conservative New Democracy party, Tsipras called for supporters to mobilise, hoping for a turn around.
“Today we are fighting this battle from the first to the last minute. With optimism and determination. The ballots are empty and all possibilities are open,” he tweeted on Sunday.
The polls have consistently forecast that New Democracy headed by Kyriakos Mitsotakis, a former banker and scion of a leading Greek political family, will win an absolute majority in Sunday’s legislative elections.
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.
According to the latest polls, New Democracy is expected to gain between 151 to 165 seats in the 300-seat parliament. Syriza meanwhile is forecast to fall from 144 seats to between 70 and 82.
Tsipras called the snap election in June after losing both European and local elections to Mitsotakis’ New Democracy in the space of two weeks.
The man tipped be Greece’s next prime minister is a 51-year-old Harvard graduate and former McKinsey consultant with controversial civil service job cuts on his resume.