Greek elections a one-horse race after conservatives topple left-wing strongholds#news
Channel: YoutubeNews
Date: 2023-06-23

-Greek elections a one-horse race after conservatives topple left-wing strongholds

ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Greeks return to the polls Sunday for a second general election in five weeks, with the conservative front-runners eyeing a landslide win after toppling strongholds dominated by their opponents for decades.

Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the 55-year-old conservative leader, is seeking a second four-year term as prime minister. His center-right New Democracy party won by a huge margin in May elections but is heading to a second ballot to take advantage of election law changes that favor the winning party.

Sunday’s vote comes days after hundreds of migrants died and went missing in southern Greece when an over-crowded fishing trawler capsized and sank, drawing criticism over how Greek authorities handled the rescue.

But the disaster did little to dent Mitsotakis’ 20-point lead in opinion polls over left-wing rivals.

As Greece emerges from a major financial crisis in the previous decade and turmoil caused by the pandemic, voters are happy to return a prime minister who delivered growth and lower unemployment, according to analyst Yannis Tsirbas.
“What we see here is economic voting,” said Tsirbas, a political scientist at the University of Athens.

Mitsotakis, he argued, has successfully reached out to centrist voters, helped by an often-obliging private news media and by muting some prominent right-wing voices in his own party.

“He has been building this profile of a moderate politician and an effective politician for many years now,” he said of Mitsotakis, whose late father Constantine Mitsotakis was a divisive figure who served as prime minister in the early 1990s.

The younger Mitsotakis, a Harvard graduate, has vowed to rebrand Greece as a pro-business and fiscally responsible euro zone member.

The strategy, so far, has worked: New Democracy routed left-wing opponents in May, crucially winning Socialist strongholds on the island of Crete and lower-income areas surrounding Athens, some for the first time.
One of those areas to flip is the mountain-slope Athens district of Kaisariani, once nicknamed “Little Stalingrad.” It has a fiercely proud tradition of support for the Communist Party rooted in World War II resistance and the ugly Cold War aftermath that included a three-year civil war.

Theodoros Sideris grew up in a shack, playing on Kaisariani’s dirt roads, and volunteering to sell a left-wing newspaper on streets corners.
“I come from a left-wing family, and I was a supporter of the left. I had relatives in prison for their beliefs. My mother was a communist, my father too – that’s all there was,” said Sideris, who spends his afternoons volunteering at an open-air cinema run by the municipality.

Now aged 76, he has switched to the conservatives for the first time, disillusioned by negative campaigning on the Left.
Article from ➡️ ➡️ ៖ https://apnews.com/article/greece-elections-kyriakos-mitsotakis-68ede5199cd79d8ddc956253655d688a
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