Elections

Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis insisted Tuesday that Greece will be able to regain investment grade with a strong New Democracy government and that his "his victory over populism in Greece" serves as a lesson "for other liberal democracies."

"If you deliver real change for people, people will reward you," he told CNN's Christiane Amanpour.

The number of applications to volunteer as observers in the presidential election runoff on May 28 has exceeded 200,000, tripling the figure seen two weeks ago, a volunteer organization of election monitoring has said.

Authorities on Crete have said that the returning officer from one polling station is missing, along with the bag containing the votes cast.

The officer was assigned to the 198th polling station, which was based at the 13th Primary School in Iraklio, the island's biggest city.

A total of 31.52 percent of registered voters have participated in Greece's legislative elections so far, according to Michalis Stavrianoudakis, the Interior Ministry's general secretary.

This figure is based on the data received from judicial representatives at 16,520 polling stations, which accounts for 77 percent of the total polling stations across the country. 

Nearly 500,000 Turkish citizens living abroad have cast their ballots in the presidential election runoff in just one day, causing long queues at the country's foreign representations.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has announced that the government will hand over the first batch of new homes to earthquake victims by October or November, underlining that their priority will be the reconstruction of the quake-hit provinces if they win the presidential elections on May 28.

With less than 24 hours remaining until the start of voting in the general election in Greece, the voting process began on Saturday as polling stations abroad opened to allow Greeks registered to vote abroad cast their ballot.

Of the 9.8 million voters on the electoral rolls, 400,000 are first-time voters.

Voting for the second round of the presidential election slated for May 28 at home began for Turkish citizens living abroad on May 20 at the foreign representative offices and customs gates.

The Supreme Election Council (YSK) installed ballot boxes at 167 points in Türkiye's 151 representatives in 73 countries.

"It is again confirmed that we do not know ourselves and that we take our fantasies for real," a Turkish friend wrote to me on Monday. It is difficult to feel just how much many Turks hoped that, at last, they would see an end to the slide towards greater autocracy and towards greater distance from the European Union. 

While voters with digital IDs may use them to identify themselves at polling stations on Sunday's general election, they may face delays, an Interior Ministry official has warned.