With Kyriakos Mitsotakis telling supporters the party is “in the final stretch” before the next election, New Democracy’s strategists have been studying where its support went, comparing how the party’s 2023 voters behaved at the European Parliament elections a year later. The picture that emerges is of a party losing voters in two directions at once, to its right and to its left.
The scale of the drop
According to the study on abstention, prepared by government officials and seen by To Vima, only 70.4% of the citizens who backed New Democracy in the June 2023 general election, which returned Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis to power, voted for it again at the European elections of June 2024. In absolute terms, the party lost roughly 989,900 voters in a single year.
The largest group, an estimated 550,000, did not switch sides. They abstained and stayed home on voting day. The study describes most of them as soft center-right voters.
Of the 439,900 former New Democracy voters who did not abstain but chose another party, 238,600, or 14.6%, moved to parties on its left, and 201,300, or 12.4%, moved to its right.
On the right, the biggest beneficiary was Elliniki Lysi, a far-right nationalist party, which drew roughly 87,000. Foni Logikis took about 58,000, Niki around 42,000, and the Patriots roughly 11,000.
On the left, PASOK, the historic center-left party, gained about 78,000. SYRIZA, then led by Stefanos Kasselakis, took 59,000. Andreas Loverdos’s Democrats drew 31,000, Plefsi Eleftherias attracted 22,800 voters , the Communist Party (KKE) 20,000, and Petros Kokkalis’s Cosmos 18,000. New Democracy clawed back part of these losses, attracting roughly 110,000 voters who had chosen other parties a year earlier.
Which voters slipped away
New Democracy held on to fewer of its 2023 voters than the national average of 70.4% in two key areas: Attica, the region around Athens, where 66.9% backed it again, and Macedonia and Thrace in the north, where it kept 66.8%. Measured instead by the drop in its overall vote share, the party fell most steeply in the South Aegean, down 16%, the Ionian Islands and central Greece, down 13.4%, the Peloponnese and eastern Macedonia and Thrace, down 13%, and again in Attica, down 13.3%.
The party’s losses cut across the ideological spectrum. It gave up the most ground among center-right voters, down 14.7%, and centrists, down 14%. It also shed support among far-right voters, down 12.8%, and right-wing voters, down 11.9%, some of whom, the study suggests, were displeased by the legalization of same-sex marriage that the government had introduced a few months earlier.
The damage was sharpest among certain occupations. Students fell away most, down 17%, followed by the self-employed, down 16%, the unemployed, down 16.1%, and farmers, down 15.2%. The party also scored lower among men, at 27.9%, than among women, at 29.2%.
Record turnout collapse, same result
The losses came against the lowest turnout in modern Greek history. Participation in the 2024 European elections fell to 41.24%, and abstention climbed to a record 58.76%.
That collapse explains a paradox in the result. New Democracy lost nearly half the people who had voted for it in 2023, a fall of 46.8%. Yet its vote share dropped by only 12.25 points, from 40.56% to 28.31%. With so many other voters also staying home, the party’s diminished total still accounted for a far larger portion of a much smaller electorate.
Greek voters: A long retreat from the ballot box
The 2024 figures are the low point of a two-decade slide. In the 2004 general election, a record 7,573,368 Greeks cast ballots, a turnout of 76.5%. By the 2024 European elections, the number had fallen to 3,972,473. The economic and institutional crisis of the bailout years, appears to have entrenched the habit of Greeks of staying away from the ballot box.
More than 1.3 million people who voted in the repeat general election of June 2023 skipped the European ballot box twelve months later. Measured against the first round of May 2023, the number who sat out the 2024 vote reached 2.1 million, more than a third of those who had voted barely thirteen months before.
The government’s analysis drew several conclusions about who those absent voters were. Abstention was not partisan: turnout held at around 40% both in constituencies where New Democracy ran strong and in those where it ran weak. It was not strongly geographic, rising slightly more in urban centers, up 13%, than in non-urban areas, up 10.9%. It was generational, falling most sharply among the youngest voters, aged 17 to 24, and those in their prime working years, 35 to 44, while older Greeks turned out more reliably. And it varied little by profession, though students, the self-employed, the unemployed and farmers stayed away in greater numbers than pensioners, salaried employees and homemakers.
