Former PM's New Democracy party leads in Greece: Exit polls

Athens [Greece], June 25 : Greece's conservative New Democracy party is leading the country's parliamentary election, Al Jazeera reported citing an exit poll.

According to the Exit Poll, former Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis' New Democracy party is set to clinch a second term in office with a clear majority.

The exit poll showed that the New Democracy was 40-44 per cent of the vote versus 16.1-19.1 per cent for Alexis Tsipras' Syriza party, which governed the country during 2015-2019.

Greeks voted for a second time in little more than a month to elect a new parliament, with voters having been expected to give Mitsotakis's conservative party a second term in office.

Polling stations across the country opened at 7 am (04:00 GMT) on Sunday and closed 12 hours later, with results expected by about 17:00 GMT, reported Al Jazeera.

The vote is overshadowed by a boat wreck off the coast of western Greece about a week ago in which hundreds of refugees and migrants either died or went missing.

But the disaster is unlikely to significantly affect the overall outcome as Greeks are expected to focus on domestic economic issues.

Last time also the New Democracy party won the election but not with a clear majority.

Mitsotakis' New Democracy party was 40.83 per cent of the votes, ahead of the left-wing Syriza party of Alexis Tsipras, which had 20.1 per cent.

The projections from Greece's interior ministry showed New Democracy falling six seats short of an outright majority in parliament, leaving Mitsotakis with the choice of building a coalition or bringing about a new ballot for a decisive result, reported Al Jazeera.

Meanwhile, in this election, Mitsotakis' main rival is Alexis Tsipras, the 48-year-old head of the left-wing Syriza party who served as prime minister from 2015 to 2019, during some of the most turbulent years of Greece's nearly decade-long financial crisis.

Tsipras fared dismally in the May elections, coming a distant second, 20 percentage points behind the New Democracy. He has been trying to rally his voter base, a task complicated by splinter parties formed by some of his former associates.

Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor