The year 2023 will, if anything, be remembered as one of immense political upheaval.
Those who claimed that the impact of the bailout cycle on the country’s political scene had shaped a new order of things, which was becoming consolidated, were proven wrong in practice.
The unquestionable dominant player on the political scene is Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, while his ruling New Democracy party has managed to extend its reach far beyond the boundaries of the traditional right and make inroads into the political center.
The catalyst for the emergence of the new political landscape was undoubtedly the May-June double elections, which ND emphatically won.
After four years of governing the country and having managed a series of difficult and demanding crises, New Democracy succeeded in increasing its electoral strength.
For its part, leftist SYRIZA has entered a long period of decline since the May-June elections, which still does not seem to be over.
The party that grew into a giant during the memorandum adventure of the previous decade and formed a government saw its ratings plummet in the elections.
If that wasn’t enough, it also lost – at least in terms of opinion polls – second place to the steadily, albeit very slowly, rising PASOK.
The year was not kind, politically, to former SYRIZA leader – and once a poster boy of the Left – Alexis Tsipras, who stepped down from the helm after a double-digit landslide loss in the June elections.
However, with the institute he will establish and the mobility he is demonstrating abroad, he is already preparing his next step, beyond the narrow domestic party boundaries.
On the other hand, new party leader Stefanos Kasselakis was an undoubted winner in 2023, although his assumption of leadership was not made under the best of circumstances, having less than a month to campaign. His supporters argue that the air of renewal he has brought will begin to bear fruit. However, his internal party opponents accuse him of turning away from the values of the Left. This eventually led to the party splintering with the formation of the New Left party and SYRIZA’s drop in opinion polls to third place behind PASOK.
As for socialist PASOK, the elections results and the opinion polls are paving the way, its leadership asserts, for it to become the main opposition party in the stead of SYRIZA.
Its leader, Nikos Androulakis, aspires to eventually reach the political heights that the once-dominant socialist party enjoyed in previous decades.
