After an adventurous campaign which lasted almost two months, a postponement included, the major opposition party of Nea Dimokratia has elected its new leader. K.Mitsotakis has won the race against E.Meimarakis

Against all prevailing predictions, Mr. Mitsotakis has managed to secure  more than 42% of the votes in this, the final round of the party elections. Mr.Meimarakis who was the past leader of the party was expected to win by most, yet he failed to draw the voters of the two other candidates after they were left out in the first round.

Aged 47, Mr.Mitsotakis is the 10th leader of Nea Dimokratia. He comes from a large political family; his father has also been the leader of the party as well as Prime Minister while his sister is one of the best known MP's for ND.

His demeanor and rhetoric has always been moderate while his politics are liberal rather than traditional right wing. During the last government of ND he served as Minister of the Interior and he is noted for his strong position for privatizations and severe cutbacks in the numbers of public servants. This is a particularly crucial point of his political identity in a country where the major employer is the state and the private sector has suffered a huge devaluation, and  shrunk, during the great economic crisis.

In purely ideological terms, Mr.Mitsotakis has never been one to express traditional right principles, something which leads to the anticipation that under his leadership, ND will make a turn towards the centre-right of the spectrum, aiming at gathering voters from a a vast pool which spans from the socialist democrats to the liberal-right.

If this proves to be true, two other parties of the Greek parliament will have to see how they will keep their, already dwindling, voters; the, largely neoliberal, Potami, and the socialist-democrat PASOK.

The current government will also have to adjust its stance to the new face of its opponent. It will be finding it increasingly more difficult to “scare” its voters by reminding them that ND is hard right. Syriza will also have to start defending itself against an opposition which is undoubtedly pro-European, much more technocratic and modern than it used to be, and will try to attack the government on the very fact that the policies that it votes for are purely liberal while it gradually loses its “moral” high-ground.

C.N.