Greece’s governing party has spent recent days trying to map where its tired and disappointed voters are drifting, and how to win them back.
Government and New Democracy officials all seem to have converged upon Alexis Tsipras as the main rival they will structure their narrative on. According to the polling data they have been collecting, the harder they hit the former PM and his new party, the Greek Left Alliance (EL.A.S), the more their polling numbers go up.
How rattled the government has been is not in doubt. One official recalled the period of the mass demonstrations over the Tempi railway disaster, some of the largest protests in recent Greek memory. “We were not just worried, we were afraid,” the official said, describing a suspicion that something in society had shifted radically and that they were unable to contain it. “Then came the Predator surveillance affair, the OPEKEPE scandal with the illegal farm subsidies, and the cost-of-living crisis,” but, according to the official, “things were different then.”
The math that reassures
The picture that has emerged over the last few months is no different. What has changed is the emergence of Alexis Tsipras and his party in second place in opinion polls, while center-left PASOK now sits third. It is this arithmetic that New Democracy finds encouraging. That configuration, they argue, is precisely what draws their own supporters back into the fold. The contest with EL.A.S has become the single indicator they consult most often.
The threat on the right
Not long ago, the party regarded the newer formations to its right as a manageable nuisance. It no longer does. Maria Karystianou’s Hope for Democracy has lost ground in the polls yet continues to attract voters from the center rightward. Antonis Samaras, a former New Democracy prime minister the party has since expelled, retains a significant share of the electorate willing to follow him, if and when he announces his own party. The response has been to sharpen the party’s profile on the right, a shift signaled by the appointment of Konstantinos Kyranakis as secretary and by legislative moves such as a more restrictive migration law.
The Samaras problem
The handling of Samaras and his still unannounced new party illustrates how fast New Democracy’s approach shifts. When rumors spread that he might start his own party, New Democracy attacked. Then it softened, urging him not to damage the party that had made him. That restraint ended when news broke of a meeting between Samaras and three sitting New Democracy deputies, Charalambos Athanasiou, Theofilos Leontaridis and Giorgos Karasmanis. The harder line returned. Dora Bakoyannis made the case, and government spokesman Pavlos Marinakis warned that if Samaras forms a party, “he will justify his expulsion.”
Experienced party officials detected a more deliberate maneuver. Samaras, they believe, recognized that New Democracy is working to recreate the dilemmas of previous elections through its attempts to frame the upcoming electoral contest as a choice between Mitsotakis and Tsipras, a framing that currently favors it. Samaras sought to break it. He began by taking issue with two EL.A.S officials, Bistis and Siakantaris, who had described the laying of an undersea cable off Kasos, an island in the southeastern Aegean, as a unilateral Greek act.
He then linked those remarks to what he characterized as the government’s willingness to reach an accommodation with Turkey. He warned of a “Prespes of the Aegean.” The phrase refers to the 2018 Prespa Agreement, which ended a long dispute by recognizing the name North Macedonia. Samaras and much of the Greek right condemned that settlement as a capitulation, and he now invokes it to imply a comparable concession to Ankara. Samaras further claimed that Foreign Minister George Gerapetritis, in a recent interview, had not disavowed the EL.A.S officials’ remarks. The purpose, party officials say, was to present New Democracy and EL.A.S as aligned on national issues, and thus void the framing Maximos Mansion is trying to create.
Against this backdrop, a tougher stance toward Samaras became unavoidable. What is clear is that, in a constantly shifting political landscape, the party machines, New Democracy’s above all, remain on daily alert, ready to redefine tactics and strategy in line with each new development.
