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26-06-2023
ATHENS: Greeks are voting for a second time in little more than a month to elect a new parliament, with voters expected to give former Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s conservative party a second term in office.
Polling stations across the country opened at 7am (04:00 GMT) on Sunday and will close 12 hours later, with results expected by about 17:00 GMT.
The vote is overshadowed by a boat wreck off the coast of western Greece about a week ago in which hundreds of refugees and migrants either died or went missing but the disaster is unlikely to significantly affect the overall outcome as Greeks are expected to focus on domestic economic issues.
Mitsotakis, 55, is eyeing a second four-year term as prime minister after his New Democracy party won by a huge margin in May but fell short of gaining enough parliamentary seats to form a government.
With a new electoral law now favoring the winning party with bonus seats, he is hoping to win enough seats to form a strong majority in the 300-member parliament.
The new electoral system grants a bonus of between 25 and 50 seats to the winning party, depending on its 
performance, which makes it easier for a party to win more than the required 151 seats in the parliament to form a government.
His main rival is Alexis Tsipras, the 48-year-old head of the left-wing Syriza party who served as prime minister from 2015 to 2019, during some of the most turbulent years of Greece’s nearly decade-long financial crisis.
Tsipras fared dismally in the May elections, coming a distant second, 20 percentage points behind the New Democracy. He has been trying to rally his voter base, a task complicated by splinter parties formed by some of his former associates.
Sunday’s election comes after hundreds of refugees and migrants died or went missing in southern Greece when an overcrowded fishing trawler heading from Libya to Italy capsized and sank, drawing criticism over how Greek authorities handled the rescue. (Int’l News Desk)
