Evangelos Meimarakis announced on Tuesday afternoon that he is resigning as interim president of New Democracy, in the aftermath of the conservative party’s failure to hold the scheduled presidential elections this past Sunday.
The former interim chief cited the party’s unity as a reason for this decision and clarified that he will still run for the party’s presidency when the elections eventually take place.
Earlier in the day, Meimarakis had appointed Yiannis Plakiotakis as the party’s vice-president. Plakiotakis thus effectively becomes the new interim president until the presidential elections.
November 22 was supposed to be the day New Democracy elected a new president, after almost five months of Meimarakis being interim chief, following Antonis Samaras’s resignation in early July.
However, the software that the party employed for the process of voter registration and identification at the various polling stations presented significant technical problems that led the party’s election committee to postpone the elections. A new date has not been decided as of yet.
Presidential candidates Kiriakos Mitsotakis and Apostolos Tztzikostas asked for Meimarakiss’s resignation following this failure, to which Mitsotakis responded that he would acquiesce if the other three candidates resign from their own positions of power. Mitsotakis resigned form his seat as the party’s parliamentary representative as did Adonis Georgiadis. Tzitzikostas has not resigned as Region Chief of Macedonia.
New Democracy’s central committee will meet at 7 p.m. local time on Tuesday.
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