Greek Elections 2023: The percentage Kyriakos Mitsotakis wants to rule effectively

The maximum possible mobilization of New Democracy for “reaffirmation of the result” of May 21 in the showdown with the system of enhanced proportionality is the dominant goal of the new election campaign of Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who openly marks 40%+ as a… minimum threshold for the party. From the double slogan of the previous period “clear first – significant lead from the second”, Mitsotakis keeps only the first part, reformulated with the phrase “strong parliamentary majority” and this time without emphasizing the importance of the scope of the difference between in the first and second parties. “The score of the first match does not count, we start from the beginning”, he repeated himself on Friday morning in his television interview (ANT1). Behind Mitsotakis’ need to bring to the fore the need for “comfortable self-reliance” and overall behind the new quantitative goals of New Democracy mathematics of the second ballot are hidden which are different from the simple proportional system.

By law, the premium is staggered (two seats for every 1%), after the first party grabs 25% and gets 20 seats at once. But the most pivotal point, the one that largely explains New Democracy’s communication strategy, is elsewhere: only if the winner sees the number “4” in front of his national percentage will he get the full – the maximum – bonus of 50 seats. From there, Mitsotakis raises his demands very high, even expecting to surpass the almost 41% (40.79% to be precise) that he achieved on May 21. “I’m only interested in the absolute percentage of ND”, he pointed out directly.

Two factors

In fact, the factors that will determine whether or not New Democracy’s electoral goal will be achieved are a combination of two factors: its nationwide percentage in relation to the percentage of the so-called small parties, given that the more parties succeed in entering Parliament, the higher the percentage required for marginal self-reliance. Indicative of how the seats are readjusted according to the percentage of the former and the number of new parties in the Parliament is the following: even if New Democracy did not lose a single one of the 2,407,590 votes last Sunday, therefore if it exceeded 40% in ballot box of June 25, would not produce more than 159 deputies since this time the three parties – NIKI, Pleussi Eleftherias, MeRA25 -, which significantly approached the 3% limit on May 21, passed the threshold of the Parliament. That is why New Democracy has every reason to once again aim for a five-party Parliament, even though all the… realistic exercises on paper are done by the staff in the blue seat with the scenario of a seven-party Parliament.

Fragile self-reliance

It is clear that Mitsotakis considers a self-reliance of 151 to 153 MPs as fragile and essentially hopes for another four-year rule with more than the 158 he started with in 2019. And he links his request for a secure majority to the implementation of “big changes” – reforms in Justice, Health, etc. Based on these, New Democracy rushes to erect dikes in three different directions: in the event of a demobilization of either the right-wing base or the voters from PASOK, in the risk of citizens becoming complacent in the fear that, discounting the result, they may finally choose the beach instead of the polling station and in complacent behavior phenomena from blue strains.

In the face of this, Mitsotakis struggles to raise again “dangers of instability” and repel the opposition’s shots about the dangers of an “omnipotence” of the ND, speaking himself of “progressive policies” but also of “only a clear and costed plan” of his own faction. Typical of Mitsotakis’s recent remark about his political opponents, Alexis Tsipras and Nikos Androulakis, that “they have lost any semblance of reality and perhaps they can afford to do so because they have abdicated the responsibility to govern the country” what about the tax controversy. “I am a center-right, progressive, liberal politician”, he emphasized, giving his political stamp, while, commenting on the “unrest in the centre-left apartment building”, he repeated the now permanent refrain of the center-right faction that in the elections we finally “vote for the government” and not for opposition.

New Democracy is throwing even more intensively into the pre-election terrain all its cadres from Evros to Crete, with special weight in municipalities of Northern Greece but not only, in which the greatest risks are recorded… of outflows for the party or to the right of its own space or to PASOK. Mitsotakis did not want to waste even 24 hours, wanting to give the “line” and the style of the second campaign himself, while the blue cadres have June 3rd as their starting point for tours with almost 500 “marked” points on the map of Greece. It was preceded by rapid “seminars” in the hall on the ground floor of the party headquarters for the political messages they were asked to convey in a “uniform manner and with knowledge of the program, without dissonance”, for the need to keep a low tone in all their public appearances and for the importance of informing the central about the problems in the local societies. In any case, positive reason comes to the fore again. The project report departs from the plan with an emphasis almost exclusively on the “perspective” of the country for the next four years.