Political ideologies

New Democracy won a sweeping victory in Sunday's election, securing its leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis a second term in office in an eight-party Parliament which will also feature a strong contingent of far-right parties. 

Greece's conservative New Democracy party stormed to victory in a parliamentary election on Sunday with voters giving reformist Kyriakos Mitsotakis another four-year term as prime minister.

With 91% of votes counted, center-right New Democracy was leading with 40.5% the vote and 158 seats in the 300-seat Parliament, Interior Ministry figures showed.

The far-right Spartiates (Spartans) party, which has been backed by jailed neo-Nazi Ilias Kasidiaris, looks set to cross the 3% threshold needed to make it into Parliament, with the latest exit polls showing it clinching as much as 5.6% of the vote.

Istanbul's popular mayor is leading demands for a major change in the main opposition Republican People's Party - as another test in the form of local elections fast approaches.

Following is the political backdrop to Greece's parliamentary election on Sunday. Opinion polls show former Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis' New Democracy party winning by a wide margin over the leftist Syriza party, which ruled in 2015-2019 at the peak of the Greek debt crisis.

May election

Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) leader Devlet Bahçeli has expressed his support for Türkiye's new economic administration and emphasized the necessity of raising interest rates.

Bahçeli's remarks came ahead of the highly anticipated interest rate decision by the Central Bank, which is expected to be announced in the coming days.

Thursday's resolution was passed with the support of MPs of the governing Law and Justice Party (PiS) and the far-right Confederation alliance. During the vote, PiS leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski announced that the country would hold a referendum on the issue of relocating asylum seekers, which according to local media could take place on the same day as the autumn general election.

Alamy Photo

Turkish Defense Minister Yaşar Güler has emphasized the importance of Sweden fulfilling its commitments in order to achieve NATO membership, citing Finland's expeditious accession process as an example that Sweden could follow a similar path.

New Democracy is clearly concerned that if the ultranationalist Niki party makes it into the next Parliament, it could gnaw away at the conservatives' majority, and this concern has prompted an effort to repatriate part of the far-right vote and redefine the party's agenda.

Romania's new Prime Minister has worked his way up from a low-ranking post in the Social Democrats to the top, while shrugging off various controversies and scandals on the way.