Avramopoulos pulls up in ND race
The contest for the New Democracy leadership became a two-horse race yesterday after Dimitris Avramopoulous announced that he was pulling out due to his dissatisfaction with the voting process. Avramopoulos had wanted «friends» of New Democracy, in other words people who had not taken up party membership but wanted to have a say in who will be the conservatives’ next leader, to be able to vote on November 29. The other candidates rejected this proposal at an ND central committee meeting on Saturday and Avramopoulos was forced to accept a compromise that allowed people to register with the party online as well as at local offices right up to the last minute. «I accepted a solution that did not reflect my personal opinions but this decision had to be taken to avoid any immediate threat to the cohesion of our party,» said Avramopoulos yesterday. The 56-year-old said that he had not been happy with the course of events since Saturday and that he wanted to avoid becoming embroiled in internal disputes. «I want to be a factor in producing new policy, with its eye on the future and not reproducing the division of the past,» he added. Avramopoulos’s withdrawal means the leadership will be contested between Dora Bakoyannis and Antonis Samaras. The third candidate, Thessaloniki Prefect Panayiotis Psomiadis, is unlikely to make an impact. This also means it is unlikely that a second round of voting will be needed as either Bakoyannis or Samaras are set to get the 50 percent needed on November 29. Bakoyannis’s campaign was given a boost yesterday when ND’s former leader Miltiades Evert said he was backing her for leader. Evert was an opponent of Bakoyannis’s father and his predecessor at ND’s helm, Constantine Mitsotakis.
