SYRIZA plays down defeat seen in exit polls
Governing SYRIZA “did not sustain the strategic defeat that New Democracy was looking forward to,” government spokesman Dimitris Tzanakopoulos said on Sunday after exit polls gave the conservative opposition a solid lead over the leftist party.
“Quite the contrary, it is one of the main pillars of the political system that is capable of achieving a win in the upcoming [national] elections,” Tzanakopoulos told Open TV shortly after polling closed for the European, regional and local ballots.
Tzanaklopoulos' comments echoed those of Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos, who said that public opinion polls and statistics “are like sausages.”
“You don't want to know what they're made of,” he told ERT state broadcaster.
Sources in SYRIZA, meanwhile, were quoted by the Athens-Macedonian News Agency as saying that the results of Sunday's elections seem to “contradict” expectations of “political developments.”
“We will wait for the first estimates of the real results from the Interior Ministry before commenting on the message from the polls with greater certainty,” the sources told the ANA-MPA.
