new legislative elections will take place on June 25

Greece will return to the polls on June 25. New legislative elections have been called for this date, according to a presidential decree published Monday, May 29, eight days after a previous ballot. This had not allowed the conservative party of the outgoing Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, to win an absolute majority in Parliament despite its large victory.

The 55-year-old leader had already advanced this date. In command of Greece since 2019, he had won 40.8% of the vote on May 21, and his party had obtained 145 parliamentary seats out of a total of 300. However, Kyriakos Mitsotakis had ruled out forming a coalition government: he therefore called for new elections to try to obtain the six seats which it lacked.

This second ballot will take place with different rules: the party that comes out on top in the votes will benefit from a bonus of up to 50 seats, a winner’s bonus which should make it easier to obtain an absolute majority.

Former leftist Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, whose Syriza party only won around 20% of the vote and 71 seats on May 21, had acknowledged having cashed “a painful shock” And “unexpected”but promised to “fight a new battle” against the right.

In the absence of a government coalition, the President of the Republic, Katerina Sakellaropoulou, had on Thursday appointed an interim Prime Minister, the President of the Court of Auditors Ioannis Sarmas, in charge of current affairs and the organization of the future election.