The parliamentary elections in the EU country are clear.
Millions of Greeks vote in general elections.
Here’s everything you need to know.
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- Polling stations opened at 7 am local time (04:00 GMT) and will close at 07:00 GMT (16:00 GMT).
- The joint exit poll conducted by the six polling stations will be published as soon as the voting ends.
- The first estimate of the vote count is expected at around 20:30 (17:30 GMT).
- The main issues affecting voters are the economy, jobs and security with neighboring Turkey.
- The parties must clear the threshold of 3 percent in order to pass to the 300-seat parliament.
- New Democracy, the center-right party led by Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, has 31-38 percent of voters.
- It is followed by Syriza, the main opposition leftist party led by Alexis Tsipras, trailing by 4-7 percentage points.
- Elections are unlikely to have a clear winner after the change in the country’s electoral system.
- A second vote is expected in early July if the political parties do not agree on a coalition. This is considered highly unlikely.
- Surveys show the country is in fairly strong economic health, with unemployment falling and growth forecast to double the European Union rate this year.
- But economic issues remain a key focus amid a cost-of-living crisis.
- Mitsotakis, 55, called on voters not to put economic stability aside.
- However, 48-year-old Tsipras accuses the “New Democracy” of conducting harmonious economics.
- If no party wins outright, Greek President Katerina Sakellaropoulou will give the leader of the largest party a three-day mandate to form a coalition.
- Failing that, the intelligence mandate will be handed over to a second party, then a third party. If the parties fail to agree, the president holds a final meeting with party leaders to form a government or interim government that will call for elections. they still can’t agree, he appoints an interim government to call new elections. A high-ranking judicial official, who is supposed to be the head of one of Greece’s three main courts, has been appointed acting prime minister until new elections.
- Crucially, in those elections, the system will return to semi-proportional representation with a decreasing scale of seats, which increases the party’s chances of winning outright.
- Under that semi-proportional system, the winning party gets a bonus of 20 seats if it gets at least 25 percent of the vote, and can get up to 50 seats if it gets about 40 percent of the vote.