Focus on coalition horse-trading as election looks unlikely to deliver a strong winner

Sunday's parliamentary election looks likely to be a dress rehearsal for a new round of voting in the busy summer tourist season - barring a surprise coalition deal by dissonant opposition parties.

Opinion polls indicate that Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis' conservative New Democracy could rake in about 35%, some 6 percentage points ahead of leftwing former prime minister Alexis Tsipras' SYRIZA party.

But New Democracy still wouldn't have enough to govern alone, and sharp divisions between the two main contenders and the four smaller parties forecast to enter parliament all but preclude a functioning coalition under either New Democracy or SYRIZA.

A second election on July 2 seems likely. It would be held under a new electoral law giving the winner a boost of up to 50 of Parliament's 300 seats, which the current system doesn't.

With the economy...