Greece's Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, has reiterated that elections will be held at the end of the four-year term, which would see Greeks going to the polls in August 2023.
Mitsotakis made the revelation during an interview with newspaper "Eleftheros Typos" on Sunday explaining that : "I think it adds large reserves of political and economic stability when everyone knows that the electoral cycle is stable."
The Prime Minister added that "progress is above all change, it is the ability to adapt to a world that is changing at a very fast pace."
Mitsotakis also stressed the importance of a political system that is competitive as far as it concerns elections, adding that "an autonomous government has more possibilities of flexibility and speed in implementing its policy".
Regarding the pandemic, he expressed his satisfaction about the increase in the number of vaccinations of people over 60. He also said that Greece was one of the first countries to proceed with a booster dose "which in the long run I believe will lead to a faster de-escalation of the pandemic."
RESOURCE | ABOUT NEXT GREEK LEGISLATIVE ELECTION
The next Greek legislative election will be held in or before 6 August 2023. All 300 seats in the Hellenic Parliament will be contested.
This will be the first election since 1990 in which the electoral system will not contain the bonus seats system, after the 2016 repeal of "reinforced" proportional representation.
The electoral law in effect for the next legislative election (in 2023 at the latest) is set to be the one voted in 2016 by the second last legislature, dominated by SYRIZA . This is due to a constitutional provision on amendments to the electoral law: a two-thirds majority (200 or more votes of the Vouli [Parliament] ) is necessary for the law to take immediate effect, and for want of such a supermajority, an electoral law comes into effect only in the next-but-one election.
SYRIZA's 2016 law is a switch back to simple proportional representation. It ditched the 50-seat majority bonus in place since 1990 (although thresholds were amended over time).
In January 2020, soon after coming back to power, New Democracy, which has always been a proponent of majority bonuses since 1974, passed a new electoral law to reinstate them albeit under a very different formula. The party list coming first shall receive 20 extra seats (down from 50, with the constituency seats up from 250 to 280). Moreover, a new sliding scale disproportionality shall help the larger party lists: those receiving between 25% and 40% of the vote will receive one seat for every half percentage point in this range (up to 30 seats), before the proper proportional distribution begins. A winning party may thus receive up to 50 extra seats. However, this 2020 law also lacked the supermajority to take immediate effect. As a result, it will take effect only in the second next election (2027 at the latest).
Compulsory voting will be in force for the elections, with voter registration being automatic. However, none of the legally existing penalties or sanctions have ever been enforced.
[Wiki]