Greek Opposition Syriza Party’s Lead Narrows
Polls Come Days Before Parliamentary Vote
ENLARGESyriza party leader Alexis Tsipras at a demonstration in Athens
on Nov. 27. His party’s lead over the ruling conservatives has narrowed,
weekend polls showed.
European Pressphoto AgencyByAlkman Granitsas
The votes—the first of which is scheduled for Wednesday, the last tentatively for Dec. 29—will determine whether Greece will be forced to hold snap general elections next month. The move to hold the votes sooner than originally planned has reawakened fears of political turmoil in the country at the center of the eurozone debt crisis. Under Greece’s constitution, Parliament must elect a new president every five years. But if none is picked after three rounds of votes, the chamber is dissolved and national elections called.
Those fears came into sharp focus this past week as investors dumped Greek stocks and bonds amid the political uncertainty. Over the past four trading sessions, the Athens stock exchange has lost more than €10 billion ($12.46 billion) in value, and yields on benchmark 10-year Greek government bonds hovered close to 9% at the end of the week, erasing gains made in the past two years. Bond prices fall as yields rise.
According to the three polls published during the weekend, Syriza continues to hold a lead over the center-right New Democracy party, garnering between 24.2% and 27.6% of the vote—a position that Syriza has held since European Parliament elections in May.
But each of the polls, in the Proto Thema, To Vima and Parapolitika newspapers, show that the opposition party’s lead has shrunk, with Syriza now ahead by between 2.8 and 3.6 percentage points. That compares with a roughly four-percentage-point lead a month ago.
The polls also show that a majority of Greeks, between 54% and 57.8%, don’t want snap elections, up from a roughly even split a few weeks earlier.
John Dimakis at STR, a political communications consultancy in Athens, said the government faces an uphill struggle convincing lawmakers to back its candidate for president. But as the prospect of national elections looms, the latest polls show a growing unease among the public about the possibility of renewed political turmoil.
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Greece’s coalition government, made up of New Democracy and its junior partner Pasok, currently controls 155 seats in Parliament—enough for a simple majority in the 300-member legislature. But that isn’t enough to elect a head of state, who must be supported by a supermajority of at least 180 lawmakers in the third and final round.
Estimates indicate the government can count on only about 175 of the 180 votes it would ultimately need to get its candidate elected. The government has expressed confidence it would get them, betting that undecided legislators have as much to lose from a new election and a potential Syriza win. The shift in the latest opinion polls, government officials say, shows that public sentiment is beginning to turn in their favor. Their hope: that public opinion will sway undecided lawmakers to back their candidate and that if the country is forced to snap elections, the conservatives could still win those elections.
“I think there is a high probability that we will be able to elect a president, and am much more confident now that we will be re-elected if we don’t,” a senior New Democracy lawmaker said.
Write to Alkman Granitsas at alkman.granitsas@wsj.com
