Alexis Tsipras

The leader of the leftist SYRIZA party, Alexis Tsipras, along with the party's senior officials, are busy analyzing the reasons behind their landslide defeat in the legislative elections held on May 21. This process of introspection is expected to continue even after the second ballot on June 25.

SYRIZA leader Alexis Tsipras has emphasized the need for his party to overcome the shock of the May 21 elections and rally their fighting spirit as they prepare for the repeat election on June 25.

What ought to have been done decisively and systematically by the main opposition since the 2019 elections which brought the conservatives to power will be attempted in the next 30 days.

A leadership change in the main opposition party, left-wing SYRIZA, will have to wait until the June 25 election, if at all.

Apart from the obvious, which is the complete triumph of Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and the devastating defeat of main opposition leader Alexis Tsipras, the outcome of the May 21 election marked an important turning point in the country's history by signaling the end, once and for all, of the turbulent time that began in 2012.

SYRIZA leader Alexis Tsipras told his party's central committee on Thursday that he takes responsibility for the result of the May 21 elections. 

A caretaker government led by a judge and with non-politicians at the crucial posts will be sworn in Thursday.

Dora Antoniou, Kathimerini's political editor, joins Thanos Davelis to break down what went wrong for SYRIZA and Alexis Tsipras in Sunday's elections, what this defeat means for the party looking ahead, and whether this is now PASOK and Nikos Androulakis' big chance to reclaim the center-left. 

Following its disastrous showing in the May 21 election, where it lost more than 11 percentage points, main opposition SYRIZA is now talking about preventing Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and his New Democracy party from becoming too powerful by clawing back some of the 20-percentage point gap separating the two big parties.

The system of simple proportional representation used in the May 21 elections was a wasteful, inconvenient and costly choice - a price we paid due to the opportunism of SYRIZA leader Alexis Tsipras, which mirrored the opportunism of the late socialist leader Andreas Papandreou.