a ‘Watergate’, trains and illegal returns

Thus, Mitsotakis has to decide between looking for a government partner or directing the Greek citizens to new elections in two months with the hope of get an absolute majority. His bet, it seems, is to risk.

But the commitment of the party leader new democracy for governing without agreeing with other formations is not surprising. Son of Constantinos Mitsotakis, Greek Prime Minister between 1990 and 1993who was in turn the nephew of Eleftherios Venizelos, a key figure in the transition against the Ottoman Empire, Mitsotakis learned to move in the political arena almost from the cradle.

What is really surprising, or at least admirable, is that Mitsotakis has achieved so much support at the polls after a legislature marked for various scandals that just a few months ago they placed him outside the new political scene.

Last February, a train crash in the town of Tempe, in eastern Greece, left 57 dead and hundreds injured. The railway tragedy was blamed on “a human error”but it brought to light the great deficiencies of the national railway system.

[El primer ministro griego asegura que el accidente de tren en Grecia se debió a un error humano]

His then Minister of Transport, kostas karamanlisresigned after the accident and Mitsotakis had to advance elections and face a general strike already numerous demonstrations -some violent- against him to demand responsibility.

Thus, things looked bad for the leader of the conservative party at the beginning of the year, whose popularity plummeted until he was just three points behind the leftist Syriza, the main opposition party led by Alexis Tsipras who only got one 20% of the ballots in the elections.

To this social anger was added the indignation for the scandal of illegal wiretapping on the phones of journalists, businessmen and politicians (including members of the opposition parties) through the Predator program exposed by the media last summer.

This spy plot, already popularly known as the Greek Watergate, targeted Mitsotakis as prime suspect. He acknowledged mistakes, claimed he had nothing to do with it, and introduced changes to the National Intelligence Service (EYP), which did not save him from facing a motion of censure filed by Syriza in January that he far exceeded.

Another of the shadows that has been haunting the Greek prime minister for some time are the accusations made by NGOs such as Human Rights Watch and even by the Turkish government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan itself, which maintains that the Hellenic Executive is carrying out hot returns of asylum seekers on the border with Türkiye.

The economic trick

Despite everything, Mitsotakis has won the elections again. And if he has had the support of a large part of the population (voting is compulsory in greece) is due, in part, to the economic growth that the country has experienced in the last two years.

In fact, until last August, the country was subject to the strict economic supervision mechanism of the European Union that was activated after the 2008 crisis. Currently, the economy is in recovery phasesince in 2022 it grew by almost 6% compared to 2021, according to the World Bank.

That has been precisely one of Mitsotakis’s main electoral assets, which, however, has not managed to alleviate inflation –which exceeded 10% last year– in staple foods. It is also one of the main concerns of 58% of Greeks, according to a recent study by the University of Macedonia.