“I don’t believe there’s any basis for the formation of a government in this parliament,” the leader of the conservative New Democracy party told President Katerina Skellaropoulou on Monday after she gave him the order to do so.
Mitsotakis is expecting to be in an even better position after a second vote, which could take place as early as next month.
In Sunday’s election, New Democracy finished first with 40.8 percent of the popular vote, a percentage point more than in the previous national polls four years earlier and about 20 points ahead of the second-placed party, the left-wing Syriza.
The vote took place under a system of proportional representation, legislated by Syriza before it fell from power in 2019.
Under that system, Mitsotakis’s ruling party fell five seats shy of the 151 seats in the 300-seat legislative chamber needed to govern again.
New Democracy has passed a new electoral law, which restores seat bonuses to the winning party. But under the constitution, changes to electoral law can only take effect in the second election after the legislative change, so no party can game the system to remain in power indefinitely.
“If the electoral system were in force yesterday that will apply in the next election, New Democracy would have a strong majority of more than 170 seats, so I feel it is my duty to help us move beyond the obstacle, as it turns out to be, of proportional representation,” Mitsotakis said.
Mitsotakis with President Katerina Sakellaropoulou on May 22, 2023 [Louiza Vradi/Reuters]
He said he would return the order to form a government to Sakellaropoulou within the day.
Procedurally, she must then ask Syriza, which won 20 percent of the vote, to form a government and, finally, the socialist PASOK-Movement for Change (PASOK-KINAL), which garnered 11.5 percent.
If these parties exhaust the three-day opportunity to form a government, the run-off would happen as soon as June 25.
It is a sign of Mitsotakis’s confidence that he decided to pass up the opportunity to form a coalition government, preferring to discredit proportional representation, a cause célèbre of the left.
On Sunday night, he hailed New Democracy’s resounding victory as a “political earthquake” and said the election result “surpassed even our expectations”.
Polls had predicted that New Democracy would win 32 to 35 percent of the vote, and even a joint exit poll put the centre-right party no more than 10 points ahead of Syriza. The result suggests New Democracy will handily win the rematch.
“New Democracy managed to persuade people that they are efficient and effective, and [left-wing leader Alexis] Tsipras and Syriza failed to present a credible alternative,” journalist and seasoned political commentator Panos Polyzoidis told Al Jazeera.
Mitsotakis’s party had promised to relaunch the Greek economy, but the COVID-19 pandemic, a refugee crisis with Turkey and energy inflation stemming from the Ukraine war sapped much of the government’s executive vigour.
Still, it did manage to lower business and personal income taxes, reduce unemployment, balance the budget and increase foreign investment.
Mitsotakis now promises to “move much faster and with greater boldness to implement our electoral commitments”.
Those include boosting exports, raising salaries and cutting more taxes.
What about the opposition?
Syriza’s precipitous fall from more than 31 percent of the popular vote four years ago has led many to predict its demise as a political force.
“The disappointment is that there’s no opposition now,” said Lefteris Dragomanidis, a Syriza voter who owns a stand at a farmers market in Athens. “I think in the next election, Syriza will go back to where it was before, and KINAL will rise. We all know that Syriza’s voters were formerly KINAL.”
A decade ago, during the global financial crisis, Greece’s ruling socialists cut government spending radically to tame the country’s massive deficit. As austerity led many socialist voters into unemployment and poverty, Syriza welcomed them.
When the Panhellenic Socialist Movement, or PASOK, came to power with 44 percent of the popular vote in 2009, Syriza barely cleared a 3 percent threshold to enter parliament, winning 4.6 percent.
Over six years, they traded places. Syriza came to power in 2015 with a transfusion of PASOK supporters, winning 36 percent of the vote. PASOK fell to 4.7 percent and renamed itself Movement for Change, or KINAL.
KINAL’s performance under new leader Nikos Androulakis is a 50 percent increase on its 2019 showing. “I thank all the Greeks for tonight’s great victory, for co-signing on the rebirth of PASOK,” the 44-year-old said on election night.
Lefteris Dragomanidis, a Syriza supporter, believes it is all over for his party [Al Jazeera]
“The Syriza project has failed, and that means PASOK is back in pole position to lead that centre left,” Polyzoidis said.
“That’s going to take years. I don’t expect them to recover anytime soon. So Mitsotakis will have an open road for several years to come,” he added.
“We know that Tsipras was hoping to turn Syriza into the main party of the centre left,” the commentator said. “He definitely failed to do so because Syriza remains a plethora of different shades of left and centre left without a clear identity.”
Syriza, too, was eventually burned by the fire of austerity. Before taking office eight years ago, the party had promised to rip up Greece’s emergency loan agreements with creditors that bailed out the Greek state, only later to sign onto one itself.
But it also suffered a spectacular series of own goals.
Tsipras was unable to cleanse Syriza of what its opponents call the “loony left” when he failed to curtail the influence of former Health Minister Pavlos Polakis, a die-hard populist.
Days before the elections, Tsipras had to dismiss shadow Foreign Minister Yiorgos Katrougalos after he said Syriza should more heavily tax the self-employed – a million-strong cohort. Pollsters found that 9 percent of them switched to New Democracy on election day.
Also before the vote, police in the central town of Karditsa caught five Syriza operatives in a car with about 200 personal identity cards, envelopes stuffed with cash and ballots marked to support a local candidate of the party.
Syriza lost support not only to KINAL but also to the Communist Party of Greece, which went from 5.3 percent to 7.2 percent of the vote.
There was a huge difference in style between the top two parties.
New Democracy set out macroeconomic targets for growth, jobs, exports and the national debt. Syriza promised across-the-board pay increases without saying how these would be paid for and seemed to have no overall vision of its national economic goals.
“[Tsipras] campaigned on the basis of what was wrong with New Democracy, not what he was going to do for people,” said Dragomanidis’s assistant at the farmers market. “He was painting everything black.”
HALIFAX – Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston says it’s “disgraceful and demeaning” that a Halifax-area school would request that service members not wear military uniforms to its Remembrance Day ceremony.
Houston’s comments were part of a chorus of criticism levelled at the school — Sackville Heights Elementary — whose administration decided to back away from the plan after the outcry.
A November newsletter from the school in Middle Sackville, N.S., invited Armed Forces members to attend its ceremony but asked that all attendees arrive in civilian attire to “maintain a welcoming environment for all.”
Houston, who is currently running for re-election, accused the school’s leaders of “disgracing themselves while demeaning the people who protect our country” in a post on the social media platform X Thursday night.
“If the people behind this decision had a shred of the courage that our veterans have, this cowardly and insulting idea would have been rejected immediately,” Houston’s post read. There were also several calls for resignations within the school’s administration attached to Houston’s post.
In an email to families Thursday night, the school’s principal, Rachael Webster, apologized and welcomed military family members to attend “in the attire that makes them most comfortable.”
“I recognize this request has caused harm and I am deeply sorry,” Webster’s email read, adding later that the school has the “utmost respect for what the uniform represents.”
Webster said the initial request was out of concern for some students who come from countries experiencing conflict and who she said expressed discomfort with images of war, including military uniforms.
Her email said any students who have concerns about seeing Armed Forces members in uniform can be accommodated in a way that makes them feel safe, but she provided no further details in the message.
Webster did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
At a news conference Friday, Houston said he’s glad the initial request was reversed but said he is still concerned.
“I can’t actually fathom how a decision like that was made,” Houston told reporters Friday, adding that he grew up moving between military bases around the country while his father was in the Armed Forces.
“My story of growing up in a military family is not unique in our province. The tradition of service is something so many of us share,” he said.
“Saying ‘lest we forget’ is a solemn promise to the fallen. It’s our commitment to those that continue to serve and our commitment that we will pass on our respects to the next generation.”
Liberal Leader Zach Churchill also said he’s happy with the school’s decision to allow uniformed Armed Forces members to attend the ceremony, but he said he didn’t think it was fair to question the intentions of those behind the original decision.
“We need to have them (uniforms) on display at Remembrance Day,” he said. “Not only are we celebrating (veterans) … we’re also commemorating our dead who gave the greatest sacrifice for our country and for the freedoms we have.”
NDP Leader Claudia Chender said that while Remembrance Day is an important occasion to honour veterans and current service members’ sacrifices, she said she hopes Houston wasn’t taking advantage of the decision to “play politics with this solemn occasion for his own political gain.”
“I hope Tim Houston reached out to the principal of the school before making a public statement,” she said in a statement.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 8, 2024.
REGINA – Saskatchewan Opposition NDP Leader Carla Beck says she wants to prove to residents her party is the government in waiting as she heads into the incoming legislative session.
Beck held her first caucus meeting with 27 members, nearly double than what she had before the Oct. 28 election but short of the 31 required to form a majority in the 61-seat legislature.
She says her priorities will be health care and cost-of-living issues.
Beck says people need affordability help right now and will press Premier Scott Moe’s Saskatchewan Party government to cut the gas tax and the provincial sales tax on children’s clothing and some grocery items.
Beck’s NDP is Saskatchewan’s largest Opposition in nearly two decades after sweeping Regina and winning all but one seat in Saskatoon.
The Saskatchewan Party won 34 seats, retaining its hold on all of the rural ridings and smaller cities.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 8, 2024.
HALIFAX – Nova Scotia‘s growing population was the subject of debate on Day 12 of the provincial election campaign, with Liberal Leader Zach Churchill arguing immigration levels must be reduced until the province can provide enough housing and health-care services.
Churchill said Thursday a plan by the incumbent Progressive Conservatives to double the province’s population to two million people by the year 2060 is unrealistic and unsustainable.
“That’s a big leap and it’s making life harder for people who live here, (including ) young people looking for a place to live and seniors looking to downsize,” he told a news conference at his campaign headquarters in Halifax.
Anticipating that his call for less immigration might provoke protests from the immigrant community, Churchill was careful to note that he is among the third generation of a family that moved to Nova Scotia from Lebanon.
“I know the value of immigration, the importance of it to our province. We have been built on the backs of an immigrant population. But we just need to do it in a responsible way.”
The Liberal leader said Tim Houston’s Tories, who are seeking a second term in office, have made a mistake by exceeding immigration targets set by the province’s Department of Labour and Immigration. Churchill said a Liberal government would abide by the department’s targets.
In the most recent fiscal year, the government welcomed almost 12,000 immigrants through its nominee program, exceeding the department’s limit by more than 4,000, he said. The numbers aren’t huge, but the increase won’t help ease the province’s shortages in housing and doctors, and the increased strain on its infrastructure, including roads, schools and cellphone networks, Churchill said.
“(The Immigration Department) has done the hard work on this,” he said. “They know where the labour gaps are, and they know what growth is sustainable.”
In response, Houston said his commitment to double the population was a “stretch goal.” And he said the province had long struggled with a declining population before that trend was recently reversed.
“The only immigration that can come into this province at this time is if they are a skilled trade worker or a health-care worker,” Houston said. “The population has grown by two per cent a year, actually quite similar growth to what we experienced under the Liberal government before us.”
Still, Houston said he’s heard Nova Scotians’ concerns about population growth, and he then pivoted to criticize Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for trying to send 6,000 asylum seekers to Nova Scotia, an assertion the federal government has denied.
Churchill said Houston’s claim about asylum seekers was shameful.
“It’s smoke and mirrors,” the Liberal leader said. “He is overshooting his own department’s numbers for sustainable population growth and yet he is trying to blame this on asylum seekers … who aren’t even here.”
In September, federal Immigration Minister Marc Miller said there is no plan to send any asylum seekers to the province without compensation or the consent of the premier. He said the 6,000 number was an “aspirational” figure based on models that reflect each province’s population.
In Halifax, NDP Leader Claudia Chender said it’s clear Nova Scotia needs more doctors, nurses and skilled trades people.
“Immigration has been and always will be a part of the Nova Scotia story, but we need to build as we grow,” Chender said. “This is why we have been pushing the Houston government to build more affordable housing.”
Chender was in a Halifax cafe on Thursday when she promised her party would remove the province’s portion of the harmonized sales tax from all grocery, cellphone and internet bills if elected to govern on Nov. 26. The tax would also be removed from the sale and installation of heat pumps.
“Our focus is on helping people to afford their lives,” Chender told reporters. “We know there are certain things that you can’t live without: food, internet and a phone …. So we know this will have the single biggest impact.”
The party estimates the measure would save the average Nova Scotia family about $1,300 a year.
“That’s a lot more than a one or two per cent HST cut,” Chender said, referring to the Progressive Conservative pledge to reduce the tax by one percentage point and the Liberal promise to trim it by two percentage points.
Elsewhere on the campaign trail, Houston announced that a Progressive Conservative government would make parking free at all Nova Scotia hospitals and health-care centres. The promise was also made by the Liberals in their election platform released Monday.
“Free parking may not seem like a big deal to some, but … the parking, especially for people working at the facilities, can add up to hundreds of dollars,” the premier told a news conference at his campaign headquarters in Halifax.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 7, 2024.
