John Mueller (1970), now Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Ohio State University, in his classic analysis of the popularity of presidents in the US, argued that the rise in popularity of political leaders in times of international crises is not due to a substantial change in citizens’ political preferences, but instead to a psychological mechanism of social solidarity which he called “rallying around the flag”. According to Mueller, events of high political intensity trigger reflexes of national unity that make internal political confrontation socially undesirable. As a result, citizens suspend their criticism of the government and express increased support for the political leader of the day, regardless of their previous evaluation of his or her governance. The intensity and duration of this patriotic surge hinge on the magnitude of the crisis, but, as William Baker and John Oneal (2001) note, they also depend on the attitude of the media, whose coverage will allow the ‘rallying around the flag’ to gain mass appeal. However, this sense of solidarity is temporary and diminishes as the crisis continues, resulting in the gradual return of the normal conditions of political competition and party politics.
Regardless of specific events and crises that may set the “rallying around the flag” in motion, the decline in presidential popularity and influence is rooted in a mechanism of long-term decline, which Mueller calls the “coalition of minorities” variable. According to his argument, every president—and, by analogy, every prime minister—is elected on the basis of a heterogeneous electoral alliance of social groups and political currents which, rather than constituting a solid majority, is actually a cluster of “minority” bases of support. With the alliance in power, the government’s choices and the disillusionment and objections they provoke lead parts of the alliance that rallied “around the flag” to distance themselves; while they may not necessarily move over into opposition, they do adopt a stance of abstention, indifference or mild political disapproval. The prestige of the political leader and the ability of the administration to manage crises can influence the pace at which this shift takes place. The result is a gradual and virtually irreversible decline in the popularity of the president and the government, which is due less to voters actively changing their political or ideological stance and more to an erosion of the support of the original coalition and to a decline in “minority” support for the president or government.
New Democracy (ND), the party headed by Kyriakos Mitsotakis, came to power in the national elections of July 2019, voted in by almost 40% of the electorate, almost 8 percentage points ahead of the incumbent SYRIZA. Four years later, in the elections of June 2023, ND increased its electoral share slightly, approaching 41% of the vote and surging almost 23 percentage points ahead of the main opposition party, whose electoral influence had dramatically declined in the interim. ND’s clear electoral supremacy, which took shape during the post-memorandum period and in the context of the electoral realignment that followed the Prespa Agreement, contributed to the creation of new fault lines in the electorate. Combined with the decline in the two-party system and the party-political fragmentation to both the left and right of the ruling party, this helped create the impression that ND enjoyed a stable and entrenched dominance over the post-memorandum Greek party system.
However, this turned out to be, if not outright misleading, then temporary at best. ND’s electoral rise and apparent dominance were rooted not in the formation of a stable and ideologically coherent majority, but rather in the coming together of a heterogeneous electoral alliance consisting of voters from the center and center-left, large parts of the traditional right, as well as limited but crucial inflows from the far right. This alliance was primarily of a contingent and non-ideological nature, being based on the need for political stability and not on a deeper ideological convergence. Which means that the gradual erosion of the government’s popularity does not represent a sudden upheaval in the political landscape, but stems instead from the progressive—and near-inevitable—de-alignment of the individual components of the “minority” electoral alliance that originally supported the rise of ND and Kyriakos Mitsotakis to power.
The data regarding the decline in popularity of the Prime Minister and the electoral influence of his government do not reveal voters abandoning ND for other parties in any significant numbers, but mainly an increase in the number of undecided voters, an increase in voter abstentions, and slippage within specific social groups who formed the electoral backbone of the original government coalition. This image corresponds exactly to the mechanism described by John Mueller: the fall in popularity results not from a political upheaval, but from the gradual de-alignment of a heterogeneous and pragmatic, but not ideologically unified, electoral base. The polling data also suggest that this coalition is now disintegrating at a faster rate due to cumulative crises and fatigue after five and a half years of ND rule, not because an alternative majority coalition has formed against the government.
The question that arises is whether the new parties under discussion and linked to figures like Maria Karystianou, Alexis Tsipras and even Antonis Samaras could accelerate the decline in government influence. The answer is yes, but not in the way this is usually meant in the public discourse. I will argue that, once established, these parties could function as secondary channels for absorbing the existing flow of voters disaffected with the government bloc, rather than as the root cause of its deterioration. Polling data show that a fall in support initially manifests itself as abstention or political ambivalence and only later translates into potential support for new formations. In this sense, while the new parties are not “causing” the government to lose popularity, they will offer alternatives for channeling the discontent of social groups that have already moved away from the governmental alliance.
Most polls show that the parties of the far right, and most notably Greek Solution, draw a significant portion of their electoral strength from disaffected ND voters, and from older men in particular who have less trust in the political system and are more sensitive to issues of national identity and security. In contrast to the general disaffiliation from ND, which is mainly reflected in increased numbers of undecided voters and abstentions, the flows toward the far right tend to reflect a more immediate and permanent change in voting preferences and ideology. In this sense, the far right is not just another beneficiary of disaffection, but a mechanism that accelerates the de-alignment of the ‘minorities’ which initially rallied around the government, turning diffuse discontent into a stable political position and reshaping the party landscape, at least regionally.
Vasiliki Georgiadou is Professor of Political Science at Panteion University, and Director and Chair of the Board of the National Center for Social Research.
