The Birth of a New Predominant Party System? The May and June 2023 Elections in Greece
In May 2023, a parliamentary election was held in Greece, at the end of the term of the New Democracy (ND) government, in office since July 2019. The election was the first since 1989 to be held with a simple proportional representation (PR) electoral system. ND won the election, as expected by the opinion polls.
However, the results came as a shock because of the twenty-point difference with major opposition SYRIZA, which lost its position as a major contender for power, thus resulting to a party system that is heading towards the predominant party category, according to Sartori’s famous categorization. ND’s victory was so impressive that they nearly achieved a single-party government through a PR electoral system, gaining 146 out of the 300 parliamentary seats. Expectedly, a new election was held one month later with a new electoral system of majoritarian tendency. ND won again and formed its second consecutive single-party government. Possible determinants of these outcomes, which will be explored in the seminar, include the large approval of ND’s economic performance and the good public image of its leader, Mitsotakis, combined with a severely biased media environment and a poor performance by the opposition, mainly SYRIZA.
Speaker: Yannis Tsirbas, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Department of Political Science and Public Administration, University of Athens
Chair: Kevin Featherstone, Hellenic Observatory Director