Centre-right New Democracy party appears to be heading for landslide victory in Sunday’s repeat poll.
Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the leader of Greece’s New Democracy party aiming for a second term in office, is on a roll. The momentum is his, the polls are looking good, and, if anything, the opposition appears assured of only one thing in the general election on Sunday: defeat.
Five weeks after more than 6 million voters gave his centre-right party a stunning 20-point victory over Syriza, the leftwing movement that stormed to power at the height of Greece’s economic crisis, the electorate is poised to repeat the result – only this time under legislation that favours the winner.
All agree it’s a ballot that is Mitsotakis’s to lose. Opinion polls on Friday showed him heading not only towards a landslide in the repeat race but a comfortable parliamentary majority afforded by an electoral law that rewards the victor with up to 50 bonus seats.
The sense of deja vu comes days after a devastating shipwreck left more than 80 people dead and hundreds missing off the Peloponnese – a disaster that has raised awkward questions over the response of a coastguard frequently accused under Mitsotakis’s watch of repelling boats carrying asylum seekers from Greek waters.