Next Greek Legislative Election

Parliamentary elections are scheduled to be held in Greece by April 2027. All 300 seats in the Hellenic Parliament will be contested.

Background

In the June 2023 Greek parliamentary election, Kyriakos Mitsotakis was elected to the office of Prime Minister once again, replacing caretaker Prime Minister Ioannis Sarmas. New Democracy was elected to an absolute majority in Parliament, of 158 MPs. Second, and Official Opposition was Syriza, that had its seats nearly halved from the 2019 elections, from 86 down to 47 in June 2023. Minor parties Spartans, Victory, and Course of Freedom entered parliament for the first time, while previously elected parties ( PASOK – KINAL, KKE, Greek Solution) increased their seats and voting percentages, in relation to the 2019 elections.

Syriza leadership elections and splits

On election night, Alexis Tsipras announced that he would propose leadership elections within Syriza, later announcing his full resignation and withdrawal from any potential leadership race 4 days later. Syriza's leadership race went into a second round between Effie Achtsioglou and party outsider Stefanos Kasselakis. Kasselakis went on to defeat Achtsioglou on a 12-point margin and was elected President of Syriza.

With his election, and his rhetoric of moving Syriza towards the political center, Kasselakis caused internal party turmoil, leading to the first major split from Syriza since the last one in 2015, and the creation of New Left, just two months into his leadership.

In February 2024, Syriza's 4th Congress was held, with Kasselakis announcing party-wide elections after internal pressure, to then back down by the end of the Congress after an agreement brokered by party officials, as the European Parliament elections were upcoming.

After Syriza's mediocre performance at the European Parliament elections, and, rapid and unpopular internal changes to the party, Kasselakis was ousted from the Presidency by a vote of no-confidence in the Central Committee on 7 September and fresh elections were called. He was later barred from running by the Central Committee, and left the party during its’ extraordinary Congress, later founding his own movement, Movement for Democracy. Sokratis Famellos was ultimately elected as President on 24 November.

2023 Local elections

In 8 October 2023, the first round of local (municipal and regional) elections was held, followed by the second round a week later, on 15 October. New Democracy lost 5 out of the 12 regions it had been elected in 2019, as well as the two largest municipalities, Athens and Thessaloniki. In Athens, ecologist PASOK - backed Haris Doukas was elected mayor on the second round, defeating incumbent New Democracy-backed Kostas Bakoyiannis, after gaining the backing of Kostas Zachariadis, the third-placed candidate backed by Syriza. In Thessaloniki, PASOK - backed Stelios Aggeloudis defeated New Democracy-backed Konstantinos Zervas on a landslide of 34 points.

2024 European Parliament election

In June 2024, European Parliament elections took place. New Democracy topped the poll, but at a much lower percentage than the one a year ago at the parliamentary elections, with 28% of the votes and electing 7 MEPs. Although opinion polls just two months prior showed PASOK – KINAL coming in second place, Syriza recovered into the second spot, but with 2 fewer MEPs, in total 4, while PASOK – KINAL remained in third place, but elected one more MEP, in total 3. Greek Solution and KKE came extremely close in percentages, but ultimately Greek Solution reached the fourth spot, and KKE the fifth, with both electing 2 MEPs with 9% of the vote. Niki and Course of Freedom each elected an MEP, and, Voice of Reason crossed the 3% threshold for the first time, electing its leader, Afroditi Latinopoulou as an MEP.

PASOK—KINAL leadership race

Immediately following the European Parliament elections, PASOK – KINAL high-ranking members raised the issue of leadership one after the other, in response to the election results that were perceived as mediocre, coercing PASOK – KINAL President Nikos Androulakis to call for early leadership elections for October of the same year, bypassing the planned ones for late 2025. Newly elected mayor of Athens, Haris Doukas and MP Pavlos Geroulanos announced their candidacies on the same Central Committee meeting, that elections were decided upon. Other candidates included Anna Diamantopoulou, Michalis Katrinis, and Nadia Giannakopoulou.
After a close race for the second spot between Doukas and Geroulanos, Doukas made it to the second round along with Androulakis, but went on to lose on a 20-point margin against him. Nikos Androulakis was re-elected to the Presidency of PASOK – KINAL and so he became the Leader of the Official Opposition in late November 2024, as enough Syriza MPs became Independent for it to drop in seat count behind PASOK – KINAL.

2025 Presidential election

By late 2024, as the purported date of the election of the President of the Hellenic Republic approached, parties began announcing their candidates for the post. Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis proposed Kostas Tasoulas, who won out in the end after four rounds of voting, with 160 votes out of 300, on 12 February 2025.

Electoral system

Compulsory voting will be in force for the elections, with voter registration being automatic. However, none of the legally existing penalties or sanctions have ever been enforced.

In January 2020, soon after returning to power, New Democracy, which has always been a proponent of majority bonuses since 1974, passed a new electoral law to reinstate them albeit under a very different formula. The party list coming first shall receive 20 extra seats (down from 50, with the constituency seats up from 250 to 280). Moreover, a new sliding scale disproportionality shall help the larger party lists: those receiving between 25% and 40% of the vote will receive one seat for every half percentage point in this range (up to 30 seats), before the proper proportional distribution begins. A winning party may thus receive up to 50 extra seats. However, this 2020 law also lacked the supermajority to take immediate effect. As a result, it took effect in the second election after the passage of the law, that being the June 2023 Greek parliamentary election.

In 2024, Greek citizens were allowed to vote by mail for the first time, for that years' European Parliament elections, through a new process, where the possibility of voting from abroad through separate ballot boxes was abolished and the previous electoral rolls were wiped, and mail-in ballots were shipped upon registration to the new election rolls for mail-in voting.

Political parties

Parties in Parliament

Opinion polling

Polling aggregations

The following table displays the most recent aggregations of polling results from different organisations

Notes

References

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Parliamentary elections in Greece
Greece
2020s elections in Greece