ND working to avoid a Pyrrhic victory
Conservatives, at a minimum, want to match the 158 seats they held in the 2019-23 legislature
For New Democracy leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis, winning a bare majority of seats in the 300-member Parliament would be no victory at all.
In fact, that result would be in a sense worse than barely failing to achieve a majority, for in that case a third election would be possible to achieve the desired result, even though politicians, pundits and the media agree that a third election, and the prolongation of uncertainty, would be unwelcome.
“To me, an overall majority – and a safe one, not a bare one, which obviously no one would want, for easily understood reasons – is a prerequisite to implementing the great changes we have committed to, fast,” Mitsotakis said in an interview to state TV ERT.
For Mitsotakis, this has a personal resonance: His father, Konstantinos Mitsotakis, governed for three and a half years in the 1990s with a bare majority, and found himself undermined by party barons.
New Democracy officials privately say that the minimum goal is to match the 158 seats won by the party in the July 2019 election, a majority wide enough to allow Mitsotakis to largely ignore party factions and to discipline MPs that strayed one way or another, either through intemperate declarations or questionable financial activities.
Given Mitsotakis’ huge majority achieved on May 21, albeit with no majority of MPs, thanks to the electoral law in effect then, it may seem strange to worry about a comfortable majority. And yet the math behind achieving such a majority is quite complicated: The more parties represented in Parliament and the more votes go to smaller parties that do not make it there, the more difficult an overall majority will be. If the latest opinion polls are correct, there will be seven parliamentary parties after June 25, up from five in the short-lived legislature elected on May 21. The threshold for New Democracy to achieve a majority could be uncomfortably close to the 40.79% it won on May 21.
New Democracy officials hope that the new elections will amplify the result achieved. And, while they want people to vote and not abstain, they also believe that abstention could also hurt other parties, especially the main opposition SYRIZA, whose voters were stunned by the loss of 11 percentage points compared to 2019. Mitsotakis and his aides are also counting on certain socialist voters desiring stability defecting to the right.
