There were fears that the second Greek election would be a repeat of the first. In terms of votes for anti and pro bailout parties, I haven’t got the figures which include the small parties. But commentators have said that the anti and pro votes stayed more or less the same.
The really big change was that the small parties lost out (“others” on the graph below) at the expense of New Democracy and Syriza, as my graph below shows.
It’s worth pointing out that Greece has a 3% threshold that is required to get into parliament. All of the two dozen or so ‘other’ parties in the graph below failed to make the threshold. They include various flavours of Marxism, various flavours of liberalism, a bunch of random crazy parties and the (probably equally crazy) ‘Orthodox Rally’ (LAOS) who was part of the national unity government before the May 6 elections.
Because the elections were so close to each other, and because there was so much as stake, people who had for those other parties knew well that casting the same vote would render it equally useless in the June 16 elections.
(As this should probably interest you: one of the three liberal parties joined ND. The other two ran on a single ticket, but still failed to make the threshold. All three of them tend to be market liberal parties.)
June 19, 2012 at 9:24 am
It’s worth pointing out that Greece has a 3% threshold that is required to get into parliament. All of the two dozen or so ‘other’ parties in the graph below failed to make the threshold. They include various flavours of Marxism, various flavours of liberalism, a bunch of random crazy parties and the (probably equally crazy) ‘Orthodox Rally’ (LAOS) who was part of the national unity government before the May 6 elections.
Because the elections were so close to each other, and because there was so much as stake, people who had for those other parties knew well that casting the same vote would render it equally useless in the June 16 elections.
(As this should probably interest you: one of the three liberal parties joined ND. The other two ran on a single ticket, but still failed to make the threshold. All three of them tend to be market liberal parties.)