Parliamentary elections in Greece will take place on May 21, announced Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis

Kyriakos Mitsotakis – Greek economist and politician. Mitsotakis was born in Athens on March 4, 1968 at the beginning of today's government meeting, ANA-MPA reported.

He said that if new parliamentary elections had to be held after the ones in May, the second would be in early July.

The term of the current parliament expires in July, but expectations were initially that the date would be withdrawn in the spring to avoid producing them in the inconvenient summer season.

However, the election was originally predicted to be in April, but after the February 28 Tempe Pass train crash that killed 57 people, Mitsotakis moved to a later date.

According to observers, his aim is probably to ensure that the disaster is not the only topic on the public agenda when voters go to the polls.

The first opinion polls since the crash showed a three percentage point drop in support for the ruling New Democracy.

At the same time, however, she still maintained a lead over the opposition, which failed to attract support after the tragedy in Tempe.

The latest survey by the polling agency GPO (GPO), presented on Star TV last week, predicted that the center-right New Democracy would receive 35.6 percent of the vote against 30.7 percent for the left-wing SYRIZA, 10.8 percent for the center-left PASOK, 7.7 for the Greek Communist Party, 4 percent for the far-right Greek Decision and 3.7 percent for the MeRA25 party of former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis.

The likelihood of new parliamentary elections soon after May is due to changes in the Greek electoral system in recent years.

The difference between the two votes will be that the first election will be produced under the ordinary proportional electoral system adopted under SYRIZA's rule in 2015, in which each party receives as many seats in parliament as correspond in proportion to its electoral result.

Parliamentary elections in Greece will be held in May, announced Prime Minister Mitsotakis

In 2020, however, the New Democracy majority brought back the old proportional system with a bonus, where the first political force gets 50 extra seats to make it easier to form a stable majority.

In Greece, however, the changes in the electoral legislation come into force not in the first, but in the second elections after their adoption, in order to avoid the conjunctural change of the rules by the rulers in their favor.

That is why Mitsotakis intends to call for new elections if he fails to get an absolute majority in the parliament.

Kyriakos Mitsotakis

parliamentary elections in Greece