New Democracy is heading into the next election with a comfortable lead in the polls, but not with the outright majority it is chasing. That gap raises a question the government would rather not confront: who would it govern with? And this is where Kyriakos Mitsotakis has a problem. He is, as analysts put it, politically isolated. One party after another, from the right to the center, has ruled out serving under him. What that points to is instability and deadlock, which is precisely the opposite of the message his office has staked its upcoming electoral campaign on.
The latest polls, published just before the summer break, made clear that New Democracy remains well short of an outright majority, and Mitsotakis well short of the third consecutive term he is seeking. That is despite an improved international backdrop. The economic climate has improved, thanks largely to the fragile calm in the Strait of Hormuz and the Middle East, and the government had hoped momentum was shifting its way. Yet six weeks of intensive campaigning, with Mitsotakis touring constantly in and beyond Athens while his aides at the Maximos Mansion and the party’s Pireos Street headquarters pushed an upbeat message, have failed to lift the numbers. The public remains unconvinced.
Voters want change
Even the polls that favor the government tell the same story. Most Greeks reject the stability message the leadership calls its strong card. In the latest Metron Analysis survey for Mega, respondents were asked what the country needs more right now, stability or change. Six in ten chose change, against four in ten for stability. Stability drew support even from voters leaning toward other parties. The mood is grim: two thirds are convinced the country is on the wrong track, and only 15 percent feel better off than a year ago.
New Democracy’s lead on voting intention is not in question. What the numbers question is the claim that keeping Mitsotakis in charge is what guarantees continuity and stability. Metron puts the party at 25 percent on voting intention, rising to a projected 30.4 percent once the undecided vote is distributed. That result would give it 120 seats in what looks likely to be a nine-party parliament. Metron is not an outlier. Even in a climate that favors it, the party is polling where it stood at the 2024 European elections, when it lost about a million voters and fell from 40.56 percent in the 2023 general election to 28.31 percent a year later. Other recent surveys land in the same range: Real Polls for Protagon.gr had it at 25.8 percent, projected to 28.3; Alco for Flash.gr at 24 percent; GPO for Parapolitika at 26 percent, projected to 29.4; and Marc for ANT1 at 26.8 percent, projected to 30.5.
Still an asset?
Look past the gloss that every party, and the government most of all, puts on the numbers, and one thing stands out. Mitsotakis is far from the days when he was seen as the party’s undisputed asset, the one who pulled New Democracy up with him. Metron finds 36 percent hold a positive view of him. On his record in office, 31 percent are positive and 64 percent negative. Asked who would make the best prime minister, 29 percent name him. That keeps him first, ahead of “no one” at 24.5 percent and Alexis Tsipras at 15. But it sits below his own party’s projected share.
The field is filling up. Maria Karystianou has launched Hope for Democracy, Alexis Tsipras has returned with the Greek Left Alliance, or EL.A.S., and Antonis Samaras is expected to form a party of his own. That crowding appears to have given the government the opening for a two-way contest, new or refurbished, between Mitsotakis’s New Democracy and a returning Tsipras. EL.A.S. took second place on entering the race, pushing aside a PASOK stuck in its own stagnation. But the shift near the top of the opposition changes little below it. The opposition stays fragmented, and paralyzed.
Casting Tsipras as the main rival suits the government, which believes it is the way to win back the centrist voters behind its victories in 2019 and 2023. So far it is not working. What drove those voters away, the polling suggests, were the scandals: the institutional ones over surveillance, the financial ones over OPEKEPE, the country’s EU farm subsidy agency, and above all the sense of a cover-up around the Tempi rail disaster, which many see as having compromised the courts and bent them to political ends. Among centrist voters in particular, the state of the country’s institutions now ranks as the biggest problem after the cost of living.
The government is also losing ground with its own base. Just 69 percent of its voters are staying with it, low for a pre-election period. Some of that is a drift to the right, driven by what critics on that flank call a “woke agenda” and by the same-sex marriage law that split the party’s own MPs. The recent correction, signaled by the absence of government figures from this year’s Pride, does not appear to have won them back.
Politically isolated
A fresh Mitsotakis majority now looks, as many argue, more like wishful thinking. New Democracy is stuck near 30 percent, with four or five parties competing for double-digit shares. That makes it all but certain the next government will need at least two parties. Here is the core of the problem for Mitsotakis. He is politically isolated. By their own declarations, none of the other camps will govern with him as prime minister.
The appetite for coalition exists. Asked to choose, 49 percent of voters favor coalition governments and 48 percent single-party rule. But a coalition under Mitsotakis is not on the table. Plenty of players would join a government built around New Democracy. What they will not accept is Mitsotakis staying at the wheel, a line drawn by figures as varied as Kyriakos Velopoulos, Afroditi Latinopoulou, Maria Karystianou and Antonis Samaras. Even PASOK, committed by a recent party congress to keeping its distance from New Democracy, would not support a government under the man it never tires of calling “the politician who spied on Nikos Androulakis.” By this reading, Mitsotakis has become a leading source of the very instability his campaign was meant to head off, and recent events support it. “The welcome Defense Minister Nikos Dendias gave Nikos Androulakis last Thursday says a great deal,” one veteran government figure remarked. Even more telling, he added, was the decision of three New Democracy MPs, Charalambos Athanasiou, Theofilos Leontaridis and Giorgos Karasmanis, to meet Samaras in public “to discuss the need to protect the unity of the movement.”
More and more political figures, some even inside the government itself, now agree that Mitsotakis is not well-suited to give the slogan of “stability and continuity” any substance. He does not speak to, or keep any channel of communication open with, the leaders of the parties in the current parliament, the same people who would hold the mandates to try to form a government the day after the election. And he has, they say, belittled and insulted the two former prime ministers who led New Democracy before him, Kostas Karamanlis and Antonis Samaras.
