Winning votes and weathering storms: the 2009 European and parliamentary elections in Greece, election report

In 2007, the New Democracy (ND) party led by Kostas Karamanlis renewed its term in office, albeit with a very slim parliamentary majority (see Gemenis 2008). For the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) the result marked the fourth consecutive defeat in local, national and European elections and drove the party into a crisis. Although its president, George Papandreou, easily won the open primary with more than 55% of the vote, the party fell into a protracted internal party fighting which lasted several months. For the following nine months, the opinion polls indicated that disillusioned PASOK supporters were moving towards the Coalition of the Left, of Movements and Ecology, known as Synaspismos (SYN), which was experiencing a remarkable surge in its popularity (Figure 1). This popularity was also related to the election of the former party spokesman Alexis Tsipras as the new party president in the February 2008 party congress, which was devised as a strategy to make the party more appealing to young voters.