2015 Greek legislative Election - Syriza wins an emphatic victory Sunday Sep 20,2015

 

Syriza,the radical leftist party that stormed to a historic victory in January and then governed Greece through a tumultuous seven months won a convincing new mandate in elections on Sunday Sep 20,2015, giving it another chance to lead a country still mired in economic ruin

Despite convulsive developments in Greece this year, Syriza’s margin of victory over its nearest rival was almost exactly the same as it was the last time the country voted.

The results validated party leader Alexis Tsipras’s decision to take his case to the voters for a third time this year

Party supporters cheered and danced in the streets of downtown Athens on Sunday night after the results became clear and Syriza’s main challenger, the center-right New Democracy party, conceded.

The head of the opposition New Democracy party, Vangelis Meimarikis, conceded defeat after Syriza took a sizable lead early in the counting.
 With 80 % of ballots counted, Syriza is expected to win around 35 % of the vote

For Syriza, the results give the party a fresh opportunity to steer Greece after an initial stint in power that was marked by erratic decision-making and the near-collapse of the nation’s economy amid a bitter showdown with European creditors.

Alexis Tsipras, who became Greece’s youngest prime minister in 150 years when first elected in Jan 2015, opted to call a new vote after Syriza split over his July 2015 decision to back a deeply controversial $97 billion bailout.

The deal, which came with harsh austerity measures, represented an embarassing capitulation for a leader who had campaigned as an anti-austerity firebrand and who had only days earlier persuaded voters to reject a similar agreement in a nationwide referendum.

Since then, Alexis Tsipras’s popularity has fallen markedly as voters have wondered whether all the brinkmanship was worth it.

Overall, the results Sunday were remarkably similar to those from the January vote, with Syriza and New Democracy finishing well ahead of the rest of the field

The right-wing Independent Greeks party, which also partnered with Syriza last election, said on Sunday that it plans to ally with AlexisTsipras again this time around
The announcement appeared to be confirmed when the leader of the Independent Greeks, Pannos Kammenos, joined Alexis Tspiras on stage during Tsipras' victory speech.

A total of 8 parties managed to gain enough votes for representation in parliament. The runner-up New Democracy garnered around 28 % of the vote, while extreme-right anti-immigrant Golden Dawn came in a distant third with 7%
Notably absent is the Syriza breakaway party Popular Unity, which by the end of the day Sunday had failed to surpass the 3 % it needed in the election

Note

Once the most popular social democratic party,PASOK has seen its support plummet during the debt crisis as many blame former PASOK leader George Papandreou for setting in motion the ongoing cycle of harsh austerity by agreeing to Greece’s first bailout agreement
Struggling to keep afloat, PASOK announced it will cooperate with the DIMAR(Democratic Left) party 

New Democracy  is Greece’s major center-right conservative party. It lost the election to PASOK in 2009 but resurfaced in 2012 as part of a coalition government with PASOK and centrist-left party DIMAR

New Democracy received 27.8% votes in Jan 2015 Election. Having been part of Greece’s two previous bailouts, New Democracy is a proponent of reforms and of boosting the private sector. It is in favor of implementing the recent bailout agreement and supported Tsipras despite being the major opposition party. 



To Potami(The River)is a centrist party founded in 2014 by television journalist Stavros Theodorakis with loose social liberal and strong pro-euro views. 
To Potami came 4th in January's elections and it considers the bailout agreements a necessary step for overcoming the economic crisis. However, the party has been critical of Syriza's negotiation tactics with the creditors. 

The Communist Party of Greece(KKE), the historical Marxist-Leninist Greek party, has maintained its position against austerity and calls for a Greek exit from the eurozone, arguing that all bailout agreements are imposed violently on the Greek people and spell disaster for the Greek economy and society. KKE has a solid electoral base and has been either maintaining roughly the same percentage or dropping slightly in recent elections

With its strong anti-immigration rhetoric and aggressive speech, extremist far-right party Golden Dawn  has been gaining ground in the crisis years. The party’s support, which spiked to 6.2 percent in the January election, has been mainly attributed to “protest votes” against the old political establishment. Many of Golden Dawn's prominent members, including its leader,have been jailed while awaiting trial on accusations of participating in a criminal organization and assaulting immigrants and anti-fascists 

Syriza started out in 2004 as a coalition of left-wing groups and parties. With its anti-austerity rhetoric and hard-line leftist program, the coalition grew throughout the crisis years from one with relatively small popular support into a major political force. Throughout those years, Syriza also evolved from a coalition to a unitary party, this mainly because under Greek electoral law the largest polling party receives a  '' bonus'' of 50 parliamentary seats out of 300. 

Syriza won the last elections in January 2015 on an anti-austerity agenda, but changed course during months of hard negotiations with Greece’s European creditors over a new bailout deal.  

Despite a July 2015 Referendum that showed the Greek people had no appetite for Europe’s bailout proposal and the harsh terms it would impose, Tsipras eventually caved in to the creditors’ demands, paving the way for a new round of austerity measures in return for direly needed funds.

 A significant part of Tsipras’ Syriza party, however, disagreed with the government’s concessions to its lenders, making Tsipras’ political position untenable. Fresh elections that will either reject Tsipras’ leadership or give him a renewed mandate to implement the terms of the bailout agreement appeared the only way forward.