At the polls, the Greeks reconfirm their confidence in outgoing premier Kyriakos Mitsotakis, head of the conservative party of Nea Dimokratia, who is far from the opposition, starting with Syriza.

A "clear result", even higher than the expectations drawn by the polls, but which is not sufficient to form a one-sided government without resorting to a possible coalition. Sources in his party immediately clarified that Mitsotakis intends to give up an exploratory mandate to return to the polls on June 25, with an electoral system that can guarantee him a more secure majority.

"The data from the polls are clear: the message is that Nea Dimokratia is autonomous", confirmed the outgoing prime minister, explaining that the "proportional system leads to dead ends": "In the next elections we will demonstrate that what the citizens wanted, the self-sufficiency of Nea Dimokratia, will be confirmed mathematically". The scenario is dictated right from the first partial data which show Mitsotakis's party at 41%, while the main rival Syriza, led by former premier Alexis Tsipras, is stationary at 20%. Behind them, the socialist party of Pasok with 11% of the votes, while the formation of the former finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, with 2.4, risks not entering parliament. Mitsotakis, who received the congratulatory phone call from Tispras, therefore fell short of an absolute majority in the 300-seat parliament. And if at this point, according to the Constitution, the phase of negotiations for a government alliance should begin, the leader of the conservatives has already made it known that he does not want to form a coalition and that he is aiming for a one-sided government, free from the "blackmail of other departed".

The new elections will have to be held with a different electoral system, approved precisely during the government of Nea Dimokratia, which directly assigns a bonus of seats, up to a maximum of 50, to the winning party. Even the socialist leader Nikos Androulakis had reduced the perimeter of a possible dialogue in recent days, claiming that he was against the idea that Mitsotakis or Tsipras could cover the role of prime minister again. The only one so far to have invoked a "progressive coalition" to avoid a new government of Nea Dimokratia was Alexis Tsipras, who now sees the hopes placed in the vote of the undecided and younger voters dashed for a possible comeback. Even the leader of the left has made it clear that he already wants to prepare for the new electoral round. "The electoral cycle is not over," he said from his party headquarters: "Changes" must be made immediately "to fight the battle in the best possible conditions." "We will run faster, for better wages, jobs, a better health system, a stronger Greece", Mitsotakis reiterated in the evening, adding: "I am proud and feel the weight of responsibility for such an important result". Elected for the first time in 2019, in the four years of his government he managed to keep his approval ratings high, even after the scandal of the wiretapping of politicians and journalists that broke out last summer, and the Tebi train tragedy in February. where 57 people lost their lives. A Harvard graduate, with a past as an economic analyst at Chase Bank in London, Mitsotakis, 55, belongs to a long-lived Greek political dynasty : his father was himself prime minister, while his nephew is the current mayor of Athens. During the electoral campaign, Mitsotakis presented himself as the reassuring face who accompanied the country out of the painful debt crisis: last year Greece exited the European Union's economic surveillance program and recorded a growth of 5, 9%.

Nea Dimokratia's electoral slogan, "Do we go back, or do we go forward?", which alluded to the previous Tsipras government, elected in the midst of the debt crisis in 2015, seems to have resonated with the voters.

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