Kyriakos Mitsotakis was elected president of New Democracy (ND) on January 10, 2016, just 4.5 months after SYRIZA’s second election victory in September 2015. Just one week after his election, ND had already regained the lead in the polls — and has maintained it ever since, for a full nine years.

His main opponent all these years has been — and remains — “No one”; following Alexis Tsipras’s departure, Mitsotakis continues to hold a double-digit lead in suitability for prime minister, while all potential rivals poll in single digits. Due to SYRIZA’s fragmentation, PASOK is technically the official opposition in Parliament, but in polling terms, it is clearly surpassed by Zoe Konstantopoulou’s party, Course of Freedom.

In voting intention estimates, ND is now polling at the same levels as last September, slightly above its showing in the European elections — around 29–30%, depending on the survey — as the “Tempi accident fever” has visibly subsided.

By contrast, PASOK has seen four months of steady decline, SYRIZA three months of losses, and only Zoe Konstantopoulou has more than tripled her share, though she still poses no real threat to the ruling party. These are hard times for the opposition…

The Shift to the Center

Mitsotakis’s election marked a velvet rupture with the Karamanlis legacy of ND and a pivot to the center: his core team in that internal party race — with figures like Kyriakos Pierrakakis — had no ties to Antonis Samaras or Kostas Karamanlis.

Mitsotakis essentially united moderate right-wingers who had voted for his father, and modernizers who supported Kostas Simitis. What held them together was their shared goal of defeating SYRIZA and Tsipras’s policies — a goal that later evolved into a reformist alliance, largely homogenizing the party.

Fiscal Freedom

At the same time, Mitsotakis enjoyed something forgotten in the bailout era: freedom from fiscal constraints. Initially due to the pandemic, and later because of surging tax revenues driven by inflation from the war in Ukraine and digital anti-tax-evasion measures.

After nine years of austerity, Mitsotakis became the first prime minister who could announce tax cuts and wage increases — essentially, a return to normalcy.

He also gained personal followers: since 2016, in all polls, he consistently polls higher than his party, while Nikos Androulakis, both after his first party leadership win in 2021 and his re-election in 2024, barely gathers 40% of PASOK’s support in suitability for PM — with zero crossover appeal to voters of other parties.

The Power of Broad Appeal

Cross-party appeal in a candidate for prime minister is the number one asset in the race for political dominance. Today, only Kyriakos Mitsotakis and Zoe Konstantopoulou enjoy such broader popularity — but for very different reasons.

Mitsotakis is seen as the PM choice of a broader coalition — for example, from the 2015 referendum “Yes” bloc, even if only as the lesser evil. Konstantopoulou, on the other hand, is chosen across party lines as the “voice of protest” on all issues — especially following the Tempi train tragedy.
Androulakis’s Missed Chance

The fall of 2024 was a missed opportunity for Androulakis. After his re-election, he briefly emerged as the most popular political leader in some polls. But instead of playing the consensus game, he rejected the idea outright — just as he had done earlier regarding foreign private university branches in Greece.

He stated — without being asked — that he would never co-govern with ND, only to respond to SYRIZA’s Sokratis Famellos, who had accused him of “consensual opposition.” Later, some PASOK figures floated the idea of including Yanis Varoufakis in a “progressive government” coalition — and that’s when centrist voters started leaving, returning to ND.

The Left-Wing Exodus

The second wave of voter flight came in late January — this time it was left-leaning voters moving to Zoe Konstantopoulou, who won praise from the mass protests over the Tempi disaster. Androulakis’s decision to include Course of Freedom’s signatures in his no-confidence motion against the government gave Konstantopoulou a further boost, especially as she had embraced conspiracy theories about Tempi — even blaming PASOK.
Behind Party Walls

Androulakis, Stefanos Kasselakis, and Sokratis Famellos all remain “party-bound” leaders — strong only within their own party circles. In the absence of a natural leader, opposition voters seem to seek a wild card who might overturn the status quo.

Kasselakis’s surprise win in SYRIZA’s 2023 internal elections was attributed to that impulse — and, discreetly, to Tsipras’s hidden backing. However, his ratings stayed low throughout his tenure until his eventual ousting.

The rebranding of Alexis Tsipras appears to be bearing fruit – for example, 26% say they view a potential “full comeback” of the former prime minister positively. However, experienced pollsters estimate, based on similar past cases, that if such a return were to materialize, voting intention estimates would immediately drop to 12%-13%, and eventually fall to single digits.

On the other hand, both Nikos Androulakis and Socrates Famellos have recently won their internal party battles and cannot realistically be challenged until after national elections. It’s telling that both PASOK and SYRIZA are currently dominated by a “silence of the lambs” — for instance, both Haris Doukas and Pavlos Polakis, who had vied for leadership, limit themselves to indirect criticisms without showing any real willingness to push for corrective actions.

To its right, New Democracy (ND) faces a fragmented field of parties that together account for about 20%, but are engaged in hostile relations with one another. ND remains today the most cohesive party of the center and moderate right. In fact, the departures of Panos Kammenos in 2012 and Kyriakos Velopoulos in 2015 served as an additional “alibi” for centrist voters, who moved en masse to ND in the 2019 elections — after the late Fofi Gennimata refused to place Evangelos Venizelos in an electable position on PASOK’s party list.

That move by Gennimata aimed for the exact opposite outcome — she hoped that PASOK voters who had shifted to SYRIZA in the 2012 and 2015 elections would be appeased by Venizelos’s removal and return to the party. However, the 32% that SYRIZA garnered in 2019 proved that it was too soon for such a shift — and when the time finally came, PASOK reaped very little, mostly in rural areas, thus remaining a “party of the provinces” with nostalgic references to Papandreism.

Fofi Gennimata inherited PASOK at 4.7% and managed to double its strength within four years, while contending with losses on both fronts — to Mitsotakis’s ND and to Tsipras’s SYRIZA. To a large extent, this dynamic persists today. Notably, in response to questions about post-election coalitions, PASOK voters appear split — one side leans toward ND, the other toward forming a progressive alliance.

A “2-in-1” Party

PASOK was able to manage its “2-in-1” party problem as long as the two-party system was intact and it held power. During the Simitis era, it was obvious that the modernizers were on a different wavelength than the supporters of Akis Tsochatzopoulos — yet unity was maintained both at the top and at the grassroots due to the fact that PASOK was in government. For the past 15 years, that reality has ended, but the internal divide remains.

Things are even worse in SYRIZA, where the party built by Alexis Tsipras, housing figures like Olga Gerovasili alongside Panagiotis Lafazanis, and Dimitris Tzanakopoulos with Stefanos Kasselakis, is disintegrating — steadily stuck in single-digit support.

Since the summer of 2019, New Democracy has governed without disruption. In many instances, SYRIZA believed the “beginning of the end” had arrived — especially after the Tempi train tragedy, which occurred two months before the start of the 2023 national election campaign. In the end, during the second round of elections, ND reached 40.5%, as Alexis Tsipras’s erratic moves — such as claiming he would form a government even with… the Communist Party — drove the majority toward Kyriakos Mitsotakis. In fact, that election may serve as a roadmap for future ones, despite the significant wear and tear that New Democracy is expected to suffer.