By CHEN WEIHUA, China Daily,
Kyriakos Mitsotakis was sworn in on Monday for his second four-year term as Greek prime minister after his New Democracy party won a major victory in repeat elections on Sunday that will pave the way for achieving his ambitious reform agenda.
With nearly 100 percent of ballots counted, the liberal-conservative New Democracy party led with over 40 percent of the vote. The party will hold 158 out of the 300 seats in parliament thanks to a law that grants the biggest winning party 50 bonus seats for a second election.
“The people have given us a safe majority. Major reforms will proceed rapidly,” Mitsotakis, 55, told cheering supporters in a televised address on Sunday night.
Mitsotakis promised robust growth, which he said will lead to higher wages. “We have high targets that will transform Greece.”
Mitsotakis is expected to unveil his cabinet in the coming days, though names were already circulating even before the last votes were counted.
Mitsotakis’ trusted troubleshooter George Gerapetritis, a constitutional law professor, is being tipped as foreign minister. He was enlisted in March to deal with the train tragedy, as well as a wiretapping scandal that implicated the prime minister’s office last year.
The former foreign minister, Nikos Dendias, a political moderate, is expected to move to the defense ministry.
Mitsotakis is also expected to travel to Brussels to meet with EU counterparts at a summit to be held on Thursday and Friday.
Sunday’s election was the second in five weeks. Mitsotakis’ party won the elections in May, but fell slightly short of being able to form a single-party majority in parliament. Mitsotakis chose another vote rather than forming a coalition government.
In the May 21 election, New Democracy won 40.79 percent of the vote, or 146 seats in parliament, five seats short of forming a single-party majority.
The Coalition of the Radical Left-Progressive Alliance, the main center-left opposition known as the Syriza party and led by former prime minister Alexis Tsipras, suffered heavily in the election by winning less than 18 percent of the vote, lower than its performance in May.
Power-sharing parliament
Tsipras admitted that “we have suffered a heavy electoral defeat”.
“It goes without saying that I will be the first to face the judgment of the party members,” said the 48-year-old Tsipras, who served as prime minister from 2015 to 2019.
Eight parties will share the 300 seats in parliament. Parties that crossed the 3-percent threshold include the Panhellenic Socialist Movement, the Communist Party of Greece, Spartans, Greek Solution, Freedom Sailing and the Victory party.
The newly created ultranationalist Spartans party, which won almost 4.7 percent of the vote, made many headlines on Sunday.
Mitsotakis won the elections in 2019 by portraying himself as a liberal reformist, promising to revive the Greek economy and change its image as Europe’s problem child in the wake of an eight-year depression when the economy shrank by 25 percent.
He has been credited in the past years for successfully bringing the Greek economy to stability and growth after a severe debt crisis and three international bailouts. But the cost of living crisis, which haunts many Greeks, was still a serious issue in the elections on Sunday.
The second round of elections was held just after a migrant shipwreck off southern Greece. The disaster likely killed hundreds of migrants and overshadowed the elections.
A Harvard graduate, Mitsotakis comes from one of Greece’s most prominent political families. His late father Constantine Mitsotakis, who passed away in 2017 at 98, served as prime minister from 1990 to 1993. His sister served as foreign minister and his nephew is the current mayor of Athens.
