Greece’s conservative New Democracy party has won the country’s parliamentary elections, with voters giving reformist Kyriakos Mitsotakis another four-year term as prime minister.
Official results from nearly 90 percent of voting centres nationwide on Sunday showed Mitsotakis’s party with just over 40 percent of the vote, with his main rival, the left-wing Syriza party, suffering a crushing defeat with just under 18 percent, even worse than its 20 percent in the last elections in May.
Mitsotakis hailed the “strong mandate” after the landslide victory. “The people have given us a safe majority. Major reforms will proceed rapidly,” he said in a televised address.
New Democracy was projected to win about 157 or 158 of the 300 seats in parliament, due to a change in the electoral law that grants the winning party bonus seats. The previous election in May, conducted under a proportional representation system, left the party five seats short of a majority despite winning 41 percent of the vote.
Sunday’s vote came just over a week after a migrant ship capsized and sank off the western coast of Greece, leaving hundreds of people dead and missing and calling into question the actions of Greek authorities and the country’s strict migration policy. But the disaster, one of the worst in the Mediterranean in recent years, did not heavily influence the election, with domestic economic issues at the forefront of voters’ minds.
