Sunday’s national elections have ended Alexis Tsipras’ tenure as the prime minister of Greece. The firebrand leader of the left-wing Syriza (an acronym for The Coalition of the Radical Left) party conceded defeat after Kyriakos Mitsotakis’ centre-right New Democracy party won a resounding mandate, cornering nearly 40 per cent of the vote and reaching a comfortable majority of 158 seats in the 300-seat strong house. Tsipras, who came to power in 2015, half expected electoral losses after the setback in the European Parliament elections in May, and advanced the national elections due in October in a bid to minimise damage. However, his successor has a tough road ahead as the problems plaguing Greece have no easy solutions. Why did Syriza lose? In many ways, the party’s performance was intrinsically linked to the declining appeal of its charismatic leader, Tsipras. Although it is true that under his leadership, Greece has slowly stepped back from the brink of a grave financial crisis, yet, over the years, Tsipras steadily moved away from his radical beginnings - including holding a referendum to ask whether Greeks wanted to move out of the eurozone. During his tenure, he moved closer to the political centre inside the country and became closely aligned to the same eurozone countries and institutions such as the International Monetary Fund that he opposed during his mercurial rise four years ago. In the end, it was his core constituency of voters that seem to have abandoned him as they grew disenchanted and impatient with his rule. What were the key issues in the election? The first major issue is the poor health of the Greek economy. The onerous demands placed by the bailout provided by the IMF and eurozone countries has had a crippling effect on government spending. Each year there have been cuts in government spending adversely affecting pensions and healthcare benefits etc. On top of that, the government has also slapped high taxes - both on income and property. By itself, an economic growth rate of 2 per cent has not been enough to generate enough jobs and income and alleviate the misery even as taxation has broken the back of the middle class and businesses. Predictably, unemployment has soared to 18 per cent — an unusually high figure for a eurozone economy. What has exacerbated the discontent among Greeks already reeling under a decade-long economic distress has been the issue of hundreds of thousands of migrants coming into the country from Syria and other bordering nations. The country has been increasingly divided over how to treat the immigrants especially when Greeks themselves do not have access to basic healthcare and living conditions. Does the new PM have the answers? Not really. Mitsotakis, who is the son of a former Greek PM, and has been educated in Harvard and Stanford, seems to have benefited from the voter’s anger against Tsipras. As a personality, the understated and soft-spoken Mitsotakis is quite different from his predecessor. However, much like his predecessor who moved towards the political centre from the left, Mitsotakis has been steadily moving towards the centre from the right. Many of views do not exactly mirror those of other right-wing leaders. For instance, he reportedly supports LGBT rights and a less harsh approach on migration. Retaining the support of those who have moved towards him, either away from the far-right Golden Dawn party or from the centre-left Syriza, would be a key challenge. Similarly, on the economy, although Mitsotakis has come to power promising lower taxes and more prosperity, yet given the fact that Greece is obligated to stringent fiscal limits, which, in turn, requires the government to limit its spending and boost its revenues, there is very little that Mitsotakis can do to turn things around in a hurry.
