Suppose they gave an election and nobody came? That’s almost what it was like in the first round of Greek municipal elections on May 18 when voters, apparently turned off by politics, bickering, blame games, finger pointing and crushing austerity measures, stayed away in droves.
The absentee rate was 38.4 percent, figures showed, with 4-in-10 Greeks giving up,or deciding it didn’t make any difference for whom they voted because their lives weren’t going to get any better. Campaign promises and vows were ignored by the disenfranchised, who stayed home.
The percentage of absent voters was most notable in the Municipality of Athens, where just 50 percent of capital’s electorate turned out, with 232,399 votes cast from a body of 477,771.
The highest percentage of voters who decided not to turn out for the vote was on the remote island of Aghios Efstratios in the northern Aegean, where abstentions reached 73.2 percent, while the highest rate of voting was on the island of Antiparos in the Cyclades, where 80 percent of citizens voted.
Data show that residents of border regions were the least interested, with the abstention rate in Prespes, Florina, in northern Greece reaching 71.5 percent, in Kastelorizo in the southeastern Aegean 69.9 percent and on the eastern Aegean island of Lemnos 62.9 percent.
The rate of votes cast was slightly higher in other major Greek cities, reaching 56.4 percent in Thessaloniki, 64.9 percent in Patra, 70.4 percent in Iraklio on Crete, 67.4 percent in Larissa in Central Greece and 63.5 percent in Volos on the eastern coast of the country’s mainland.
Abstentions were also notable in Sparta, a large municipality in the central Peloponnese, where 59.6 percent of voters opted not to cast their ballot in the first round.
The data did not include an estimated 30,000 voters who are still registered but who have died since the list was last updated, a process that is not carried out on a regular basis.
Greeks will go the polls again on May 25 in a second-round run-off in municipal races where candidates didn’t get a majority of the vote and will have to square off against the second-place finisher. Citizens will also be voting on candidates for the European Parliament.
The battle is largely pitting the ruling New Democracy Conservatives of Prime Minister Antonis Samaras against his foe, the major opposition Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA), which has predicted it will win big in the European ballot.
The parties had mixed results in the first round, with Alexis Tsipras’ SYRIZA doing well in Athens and the Attica region, while New Democracy fared better in smaller cities and towns around the country.
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