Greece is holding its first post-bailout general elections on Sunday after a campaign focused on middle-class tax complaints, the Macedonia name deal and security. On the back foot after four nearly unchallenged years in power, Alexis Tsipras is fighting against the odds to survive in the July 7 elections.
Tsipras broke the mould as Greek PM. Just 40 when he assumed power, he was the youngest premier in 150 years, as well as the first self-avowed atheist. Seen as easy-going and charismatic by supporters, appearing always without a necktie, he bemused his European peers with a crusade against austerity as he launched into a whirlwind six-month negotiation that nearly saw Greece kicked out of the euro.
A political chameleon — or shameless populist to his critics — the former Communist then bowed to EU leaders’ demands and signed onto a third bailout despite his hardline leftist credentials.
But under Tsipras, Greece has consistently posted better-than-expected fiscal results, reducing unemployment and returning to modest growth. In four years in power, he has tried to soften the austerity blow with health, rent and electricity benefit initiatives for Greece’s poorest, funded by piling further taxes on the middle class.
It was this policy that Syriza leaders now admit proved their undoing in European and local elections. The party was roundly defeated by the New Democracy conservatives of Kyriakos Mitsotakis — sparking Sunday’s snap election.
Tipped as the next prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis is a hard-nosed reformer and political dynasty scion with controversial civil service job cuts on his resume.
Three years after taking over the leadership of the conservative New Democracy party once headed by his father, the 51-year-old Harvard graduate and former McKinsey consultant has pledged to create “better” jobs through growth, foreign investment and tax cuts and to “steamroll” obstacles to business.
In his sole ministerial stint in charge of administrative reform in 2014, he was handed the task of eliminating 15,000 civil service posts under pressure from Greece’s creditors.
Leftist critics say Mitsotakis has turned New Democracy into a “hybrid” of nationalism and extreme neoliberalism in an unholy alliance to keep internal party balances intact. But Mitsotakis is also credited with restoring the fortunes of a demoralised party that had lost three successive elections to Tsipras in the last five years. — AFP
Katerina NIKOLOPOULOU and John HADOULIS
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