ATHENS —
Greece will go to the polls again as early as June 25, with Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis confirming Monday that he will not try to build a coalition government after dominating an election over the weekend but failing to secure an outright majority in Parliament.
Mitsotakis’ center-right New Democracy party trounced the opposition by the most decisive margin in half a century, slighty increasing its share of parliamentary seats and winning double the votes of the left-wing Syriza party and nearly four times those of third-place Socialist Pasok. But a one-off electoral law in place Sunday denied him a governing majority.
Mitsotakis will now pin his hopes on a second election — expected no later than July 2 — where the electoral system will revert to its old setup, which gives the leading party a bonus of up to 50 of Parliament’s 300 seats. Had that system been in place Sunday, New Democracy would have secured more than 170 seats.