Greece’s New Democracy party leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis will be sworn in as prime minister on Monday after a resounding victory in a repeat election on Sunday gave him a second four-year term.
Centre-right New Democracy gained 40.5% of the vote and 158 seats in the 300-seat parliament, more than 20 points clear of the leftist Syriza, which ran the country from 2015-2019, including at the height of Greece’s decade-long economic crisis.
Mitsotakis, 55, a former banker and scion of a powerful political family, has promised to boost revenue from the vital tourist industry, create jobs and increase wages to near the European Union average.
“I never promise miracles. But I assure you that I will stay true to my national duty,” Mitsotakis said. Greek newspapers hailed the result a “historic win,” with Ta Nea writing on its front page “Mitsotakis’s absolute dominance, with no opponent.”
He is due to visit President Katerina Sakellaropoulou to formally receive a mandate to form a government, after which he will be sworn in. The new cabinet is also expected to be announced on Monday.
Mitsotakis, who was prime minister from 2019 until stepping down in favor of a caretaker premier following an inconclusive May 21 vote, said he will push ahead with reforms to rebuild the country’s credit rating after the debt crisis which wracked the nation for a decade.
While the COVID-19 pandemic and a deadly rail crash in February exposed shortcomings in Greece’s health and public transport systems, soaring prices and economic hardship have more recently topped voters’ concerns.
Sunday’s vote was a heavy defeat for Alexis Tsipras’s Syriza party, which lost more than 30 lawmakers.
Kyriakos Mitsotakis; born 4 March 1968, is a Greek politician who served as the prime minister of Greece from July 8, 2019, to May 24, 2023. On June 25, 2023, Mitsotakis won a second term as prime minister after a historic victory for his New Democracy party, for which he has served as president since 2016. Mitsotakis previously was Leader of the Opposition from 2016 to 2019, and Minister of Administrative Reform from 2013 to 2015. He is the son of the late Konstantinos Mitsotakis, who served as Prime Minister of Greece from 1990 to 1993. He was first elected to the Hellenic Parliament for the Athens B constituency in 2004. After New Democracy suffered two election defeats in 2015, he was elected the party’s leader in January 2016. Three years later, he led his party to a majority in the 2019 Greek legislative election.
During his term as Prime Minister, Mitsotakis has received praise for his pro-European and technocratic governance, his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic in Greece, and is credited with the modernization and digital transformation of the country’s public administration, as well as for his overall management of the Greek economy, with Greece being named the Top Economic Performer for 2022 by The Economist.
