Farmers, self-employed professionals and private sector workers are the main beneficiaries of the package of support measures and corrections due to be unveiled at the Thessaloniki International Fair (TIF), as well as of the economic policy planned for the nine months before the next election. Since the goal of Maximos Mansion, the Prime Minister’s office, was and remains to regroup the 40% of the vote, whether at the first or a second ballot of the 2027 elections, the emphasis will also fall on pensioners, private sector employees and young people, not least the housing crisis, as well as on regions with complex problems, such as Thessaly.

The choice of May for the national vote is strategic for the Prime Minister and his team at Maximos Mansion. In the current climate, New Democracy’s lead is not in doubt, but it falls short of the percentage needed for an outright majority: the governing party is polling between 29.5% and 31%, while 30% of undecided voters, who make up 10% to 12% of the electorate, or three to four percentage points, had voted for New Democracy in the 2023 general election.

If New Democracy could win back all of its voters who have since moved into the undecided camp, it would come very close to the threshold for an outright majority, around 35%, which would put it in a comfortably safe position heading into a second ballot, since no party appears willing at this point to join a coalition government with a partner that came close to winning an outright majority on its own.

Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’ plan is to “give time to time,” resting on a triple expectation: that by May 2027, with Alexis Tsipras, the SYRIZA leader, and PASOK, the centre-left party, fighting over second place, the sense will have taken hold in Greek society that there is no alternative party of government; that the dangerous state of affairs will turn the electorate towards a search for political stability, a trend already visible in polls from early summer; and that the measures announced at the Fair will ease the discontent caused by earlier government decisions among sections of the electorate that New Democracy had “swept” in the 2023 election.

The past is a guide here. At Maximos Mansion, officials noted that the measures announced at the 2025 Fair “hit home” in the polls from early this year, once citizens felt them in their pockets.

Self-employed professionals

At the front of the discontented are the self-employed professionals, who, according to exit polls, gave New Democracy a dominant share of their vote, marginally above 50%, helped by the notorious pre-election remarks of Giorgos Katrougalos, a SYRIZA MP and former Labour Minister, about restoring the link between social security contributions and income for the self-employed. Six months after those elections, in December 2023, New Democracy passed, amid fierce backlash, a presumptive income assessment for the self-employed, a move affecting roughly 400,000 voters taxed under that system.

State revenue rose by around €450 million a year as a result, but New Democracy lost almost half its strength among the self-employed, not only in the polls but also at the ballot box in the European elections, a shift that makes corrections unavoidable. Even scrapping the presumptive tax from 2027 is on the table, along with a cut to the advance tax payment, currently set at 80% for most companies.

Farmers

The farming vote has traditionally followed the prevailing political tide and, to a large extent, points to the eventual winner: notably, in both the first and second 2015 elections, exit polls showed SYRIZA finishing marginally below its national share but slightly ahead of New Democracy among farmers. By contrast, in both 2019 and 2023, New Democracy took more than 40% in rural areas, reaching an impressive 48% at the last election, according to exit polls.

The second ballot of the 2023 elections was held on 25 June. On 4 September that year, Storm Daniel struck Thessaly without mercy: around 750,000 stremmas, roughly 75,000 hectares, were flooded, wiping out about 25% of Greece’s total agricultural and livestock output. The consequences of that disaster have still not been fully addressed: thousands of farmers remain in limbo, which has clearly affected how they vote.

A month later, New Democracy’s regional governor of Thessaly, Kostas Agorastos, failed to win re-election in the first round and suffered a heavy defeat in the runoff. According to pollsters, that region is New Democracy’s biggest problem, since the political climate was first shaped by the Tempi rail disaster, which had no electoral impact in 2023, then by Storm Daniel, and, since last year, by the OPEKEPE scandal, the agency that handles EU agricultural subsidies, which caused months of serious disruption to farm subsidy payments. OPEKEPE carries a political cost for the governing party across the entire farming community, while production costs, which first spiked because of the war in Ukraine, are now climbing again due to the conflict in the Persian Gulf and the disruption of the Strait of Hormuz.

The government is discussing measures to offset production costs, such as continuing the 15% subsidy on fertiliser costs, even though recent price rises have reached 30% in some cases, adding to production expenses, as well as tax measures and financing tools for farmers.

At the same time, the government will seek a substantial share for the agricultural sector from the national escape clause for energy, an EU mechanism that allows Greece additional spending outside normal fiscal limits, worth €1.5 billion over the three years from 2026 to 2028, for projects such as energy storage, electricity interconnections, and energy savings and self-sufficiency for homes through heat pumps and solar panel installations.

Private sector employees

Compared with 2019, the minimum wage has risen by 41.5%: it stood at around €650 (gross, on a 14-month basis) and has now reached €920 for the 600,000 workers paid at that rate, while the average wage has risen by 24% since New Democracy under Kyriakos Mitsotakis took office, reaching €1,340. Indeed, two out of every three of the nearly 2.5 million private sector employees now earn more than €1,000 a month, compared with 36% in 2019. The government’s goal is to end its term with a minimum wage of €950 or more and an average wage of €1,500. However, Greece shares last place in the European Union with Bulgaria for GDP per capita, at 68% of the average in purchasing power terms.

“Greek” inflation is showing signs of easing; food prices have already turned negative, meaning real-terms price falls, and further reductions are coming to supermarket shelves under the “gentlemen’s agreement” reached with retailers. Even so, the cost of living has been rated the biggest problem facing Greek society in every poll published over the past five years.

In the 2023 election, according to exit poll results, New Democracy took 36.7% of private sector employees, below its national share, while in 2019 it had taken around 40%, with SYRIZA on about 30%, marginally below its 31.5% national share. Yet this group, the core of the country’s electorate, had given a clear lead to SYRIZA in both 2015 elections.

The measures under discussion for the country’s largest professional group include a further cut to social security contributions, which automatically raises take-home pay in proportion to wages, as well as changes to the tax scale, since it is acknowledged that as the average wage rose, thousands of workers moved into higher tax brackets and paid more income tax, losing much of their nominal pay increase. These workers have also already paid considerably more in indirect taxes because of inflation. The government is also discussing easing some bailout-era measures, such as the taxation of benefits in kind, including food vouchers, company cars and the private insurance cover that several businesses provide their staff.

Pensioners

This group is just as large as private sector employees, around 2.5 million voters, and forms a favoured field for New Democracy: almost one in two pensioners who voted in 2023 backed the governing party, while Tsipras’ SYRIZA, then the official opposition, took slightly less than its national share among them, a gap of more than 27 percentage points in this age group.

According to current polls, New Democracy continues to hold very high support among those over 55 (not necessarily pensioners, but only exit polls have samples large enough to measure groups such as farmers or the self-employed; even so, standard polls still allow conclusions about each party’s standing among pensioners).

The government’s biggest thorn is pensioners who receive part of their pension as a personal difference, and so do not get the annual increases that 1.8 million other pensioners receive, since those increases are absorbed to gradually eliminate the difference. This arrangement ends on 31 December 2026, as the government has announced, and from 2027 the 670,000 people in this category will receive pension increases as normal, expected to be around 2.5%.

At the same time, changes, not abolition, are being discussed to the Special Solidarity Contribution for pensioners, one of the first bailout-era measures introduced in the summer of 2010. This is a levy applied on a sliding scale to anyone whose combined pensions exceed €1,468 a month, and it can reach as high as 14%, depending on the total amount. Several scenarios are under discussion, but the main one envisages changing both the income brackets and the way the contribution is calculated, since at present, if a pensioner exceeds a bracket threshold by even one euro, they pay the higher rate on their entire pension rather than only on the amount above the threshold, unlike, for example, income tax.

‘Red’ loan borrowers

Polls and exit polls do not measure them, but according to Bank of Greece data, some 1.5 million people are struggling with a “red,” or non-performing, loan they cannot service and which has been transferred to a debt-collection firm, or servicer, one of the most painful side-effects of the bailout memoranda that financially ruined thousands of citizens and fuelled the so-called anti-establishment vote.

The Finance Ministry, which has recorded a rise in complaints about servicers ignoring favourable settlement arrangements already reached, as well as avoiding any restructuring under the current law, is preparing, together with the Bank of Greece, to intervene in this area.

Young people

In the exit polls for the first 2023 election, New Democracy was ahead of SYRIZA among voters aged 17 to 24, and widened that lead in the second election that year, among an age group traditionally distrustful of established parties.

The Prime Minister chose last year’s Fair to announce a large package of tax exemptions and reductions for young people up to the age of 30, while this year’s event is expected to see the unveiling of the ‘My Home III’ scheme, which will replace ‘My Home II,’ whose funds have run out. This year’s Fair will focus on housing, with incentives for long-term leases and strong subsidies for renovations aimed at bringing more homes onto the market, in an effort to ease the pressure on rents.