Speaking to news site in.gr, Alexis Tsipras repeated a prediction he has made for months: that Greece’s next election will come down to what he calls the “ballot of reversal.” New Democracy, he argues, may well finish first in an initial vote, only to lose that lead in a second one, with his party, ELAS, coming out on top instead. His case rests on one number. According to the former PM polling shows 70 percent of Greeks want a change of government, a sentiment he believes would carry the day in a second round if the first fails to hand any party a working majority.
It is not a new argument. Tsipras has been making some version of it for some time now, when he told the 7th OT Forum on June 12 that Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis “knows very well” he would lose a second vote, and that ELAS would “fight hard to lose the first one, too,” calling the coming contest too close to call. At that same event, he cast the argument in historical terms, arguing that unity on the Greek progressive side has never come from deals between parties but from the ballot box.
What the polls actually show
The polling only partly backs him up. Every major survey in July showed a stable, double digit gap between New Democracy and ELAS. GPO had New Democracy at 25.7 percent against 14.5 percent for ELAS, describing the latter as “settling in” to second place. Metron Analysis, in early July, put New Democracy at 30.4 percent against 17.1 percent for ELAS, a 13.3 point gap, and found that ELAS was drawing its support mainly from former SYRIZA voters (54 percent) and from people who had sat out the last election (17 percent). Interview showed New Democracy at 26.8 percent and ELAS at 15.8 percent, an 11 point gap. None of the three pollsters shows Tsipras winning an initial vote outright.
The same goes for his “70 percent want change” figure. Metron Analysis partly bears it out, though its own wording is different: in June it found 60 percent of Greeks wanted political change over stability, yet in the same survey Mitsotakis remained the country’s most popular party leader, at 36 percent, and the top choice for prime minister, at 29 percent. A desire for change turns up across the polling, but it does not translate cleanly into support for any single party. GPO noted that the government’s declining popularity “does not automatically translate” into gains for any one opposition party, with 38.7 percent of respondents saying they trust none of the three largest parties. Voters who favor stability, by contrast, line up clearly behind New Democracy.
What EL.A.S. is actually banking on
The real logic behind Tsipras’s position, according to people close to his campaign, is more modest than winning outright. His team does not expect New Democracy to come close to even its 28 percent showing in the last European Parliament election. What they are actually hoping for is not a first place finish for ELAS but a close enough result to cast New Democracy’s win as a strategic defeat, one that would consolidate progressive and left leaning voters behind ELAS in a second vote. That same camp reportedly treats a second election as close to a given, seeing it as the process through which the alliances needed to form a coalition government would finally take shape, since no party is willing to commit to anything beforehand.
That refusal to commit early traces back to 2023, when Greece last needed two elections to produce a government. Under Greek law, if a first election fails to give any party a workable majority, a second one follows weeks later under a different formula, one that awards bonus seats to whichever party finishes first, making it far easier for that party to govern alone. That is exactly what happened that year: New Democracy fell short of a majority in the first vote, in May, then won one outright in the second, in June.
Tsipras points to that episode often. He notes that he was the one who legislated simple proportional representation back in 2016, a change he says he made “against his own political interest,” expecting other parties to back him in return. That backing never came. He now argues that “a party is not born to cooperate with other parties,” a line that cuts both ways: the other parties, by his own logic, were never built to support his either.
Source: TA NEA
