In Sunday’s elections for the European Parliament, the country’s ruling party, Nea Dimokratia, once again came out the winner, though with a reduced majority by comparison with last year’s national elections, and without meeting the target of 33 per cent of the vote which it had achieved in the 2019 European elections, and which Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis had set for the event. The party nevertheless won overall in every Regional Unit, with the exception of Lasithi and Heraklion in Crete, which were won by PASOK, and Rodopi and Xanthi in the region of Eastern Macedonia and Thrace, which were won by the Muslim Party of Friendship, Equality and Peace.

A record abstinence of nearly 60 per cent of voters affected both ND and the official opposition SYRIZA, who both lost seats in the new Parliament by comparison with the previous session from 2019 to 2024. Out of the 21 available seats, ND with 28.3% of the vote gained 7 seats, one less than in the previous election. SYRIZA with 14.9% won 4 seats, two less than in the 2019 election. With 12.8% PASOK won 3 seats, one more than in the previous election.

In fourth place, the right-wing Elliniki Lysi more than doubled its showing in the previous election, taking 9.3% of the vote, while in fifth place KKE also showed an improvement with 9.3% (as against 5.3% in 2019), both parties winning two seats in the new Parliament. Three other parties each gained a seat in the European Parliament for the first time: Niki with 4.4%, Plevsi Eleftherias with 3.4% and Foni Logikis with 3.0%.

Three parties with members who had been previously been active in government failed to make the 3 per cent needed for entry to the Parliament:
– Former SYRIZA finance minister Giannis Varoufakis’s Mera25 (2.5%),
– Nea Aristera formed by former SYRIZA MPs who broke away from the party following the arrival of its new leader Stefanos Kasselakis – including Mr Varoufakis’s successor as SYRIZA Finance Minister Eukleidis Tsakalotos (2.5%);
– former PASOK minister Andreas Loverdos’s Dimokrates, which he formed earlier this year (1.5%).

How the leaders reacted
In a short speech after the results became known, the Prime Minister noted that the message from the people was “we trust you, but try harder”. The government would, he said, “march more quickly and firmly, closer to Europe”. He observed that they now had three years ahead without elections and said that they would speed up their efforts for better results and fewer mistakes.

SYRIZA leader Stefanos Kasselakis seemed inclined to gloss over the fact that his party had missed its proclaimed target of 20% of the vote and emphasised that they had halved the distance between them and Nea Dimokratia. “The alibi of 41 per cent is over,” he said, echoing his pre-election slogan: “An end to the arrogance of the 41 per cent”, which referred to the percentage achieved by Nea Dimokratia in the national elections of June 2023.

The leader of PASOK, Nikos Androulakis, bemoaned the low turnout and also referred to the rise of right-wing parties in both Greece and the rest of Europe, but said that ND had suffered a “heavy defeat” from its peak in the national elections, and called the result “a rejection of contempt, arrogance and corruption”.

Some notable winners
The European elections, being outside the normal party political framework, have traditionally been seen as an opportunity to put forward candidates with popular appeal from the arts, media and sport, and the current election was no exception.

The winner by far, whose 310,292 votes represented 7.8 per cent of the total votes cast, was ND’s Giorgos Aftias, hitherto the anchorman of Skai TV’s weekend current affairs programme Kalimera. Appearing on Monday on Skai’s Simera (Today) programme, hosted by Dimitris Oikonomou and Akis Pavlopoulous – who had also taken over the weekend programme following his candidacy – Mr Aftias appeared almost shell-shocked, a condition partly due, as he admitted, to his not having slept at all the night before. With the air of an astronaut about to set foot on a strange planet, he embraced his former colleagues saying “Guys, don’t forget Giorgos” as if he was afraid that his new role might bring about a personality change which would render him unrecognisable to his friends.

Another notable winner was ND’s Fredi Beleri (238,385 votes), the mayoral candidate for the Greek minority community of Himara in Albania, who was arrested with some colleagues days before the elections in May of last year on charges of vote-buying. Beleri was subsequently elected mayor but was unable to take up his post and was recently sentenced to two years in prison, in a move seen in Greek and European political circles as an attempt by Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama to diminish Greek minority influence in his country.

SYRIZA’s winning candidates included Nikolaos Pappas (127,898 votes), a national basket-ball player who until last year was playing for the Panathinaikos team, while Sakis Arnautoglou (PASOK, 91,901 votes) has been a longtime weather-caster with ERT.

Most notable of all perhaps is the success of Foni Logikis (Voice of Reason) whose Afroditi Latinopoulou won a single seat for herself with 58,877 votes. Born in Thessaloniki in 1991, she was a tennis prodigy who continued playing in tournaments until the age of 22, when she founded her own tennis school, having in the meantime studied law at the Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki. She joined Nea Dimokratia, for which she was a candidate in the 2019 elections, but in 2021 left the party “as it was moving too far to the left and becoming PASOKified.”

In 2023 she founded Foni Logikis, “The modern patriotic party which serves Greek values – Homeland, Religion, Family and the totality of our identity as Greeks.” With her clean-cut image, passionate oratory style, and able use of social media, Ms Latinopoulou has received a lot of media coverage in the run-up to the European elections, and her message seems to appeal to a broad age-range of the Greek public. While her policies – patriotic, religious, against uncontrolled immigration, against gay parenthood, etc – seem to match those of parties generally described as far-right, it is a label she strenuously denies for her own party.