A key part of following an election is knowing the rules. Here’s our guide to following the Greek elections. Times are in GMT and parts of this post are taken from the official Greek Interior Ministry circular.
Key dates and times
The election will take place on Sunday, May 6. Polls open at 5 a.m. GMT and close at 5 p.m. GMT. The so-called exit polls, i.e. estimates of the vote outcome based on a random sample of voters collected as they exit the polling stations, are released immediately after 5 p.m.
Votes start being counted as polls close, but the process normally goes on until the early hours of the next morning. Due to the fragmentation of the popular vote in these elections, results in some areas could be too close to call, warranting waiting for final results to come in from the Interior Ministry.
Parties
Thirty-two political parties are competing in these elections. The most recent polls suggest that eight to 10 parties will elect deputies in the 300-seat Greek parliament. In the past, a five-party parliament has been the norm. The latest polls show that the conservative New Democracy party will likely get the most votes.
Getting elected
The threshold a party has to cross to enter parliament is 3% of the popular vote. The electoral system is a so-called “reinforced proportional representation” system.
The “reinforced” bit means that the party with the most votes automatically gets a bonus of 50 seats.
The 50-seat bonus makes it easier to form a single-party government.
In practical terms, the party with the most votes needs to get between 36.4% and 42.69% of the popular vote to control an absolute majority in parliament on its own. But, as the Interior Ministry circular points out, the actual threshold depends “both on the number of parties that manage to enter Parliament (the valid vote percentage required for a single party government becomes higher if the number of parties surpassing the 3% threshold increases) as well as the vote tally of the parties that do not enter Parliament (in which case a single-party government is easier achieved).”
For example, in an eight-party Parliament, the leading party would need to secure about 40.4% of the popular vote.
Forming a government
This is where the plot thickens. If a single party can form a majority government, the process is fairly straightforward. As the circular explains, “As soon as the Speaker of Parliament announces the formal results to the President of the Republic, the latter… appoints the government… as well as the Prime Minister who is the leader of the Party with the absolute majority of seats in Parliament.”
Based on the latest polling figures, however, it seems unlikely that a single party will have a sufficient majority.
In that case, the president (a ceremonial figure) gives the leader of the party with the most votes three days to form a coalition government with another party or parties. If that fails, the leader of the second-largest party receives the same mandate, also with a three-day deadline. After that, the mandate goes to the third-largest party.
If none of the three is able to form a coalition government, the president calls the leaders of all the parties in parliament together for one last stab at a cross-party coalition. But if that fails too, the president and the party leaders are tasked with cobbling together a caretaker government that will lead the country to fresh elections.
If the party leaders can’t even agree on a caretaker prime minister (this has happened once before, in 1989) the president appoints the chief justice of either Greece’s Supreme Administrative Court, the Supreme Court, or the Court of Audits, to take the reins and lead the country to elections.
The circular points out that: “in the course of the Third Hellenic Republic, the only instance of such a government was that headed by the President of the Supreme Court, Mr. Grivas, which succeeded the coalition government formed by the New Democracy and the Left Coalition parties (Tzanetakis Government), and was followed by the cross-party Government (Ikoumeniki) of Zolotas.”
Other interesting facts
Greek law has a blackout period for public opinion polls starting two weeks before the election. The last polls were released on April 20.
Voting in Greece is mandatory, according to the constitution, although sanctions are no longer imposed on those who abstain.
(source: WSJ)
See all the latest news from Greece and the world at Greekreporter.com. Contact our newsroom to report an update or send your story, photos and videos. Follow GR on Google News and subscribe here to our daily email!
