Statistikhengst
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- Nov 21, 2013
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Greek legislative election, September 2015 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
It's all pretty well described in the link.
Today's Parliamentary election is called a "Snap Election", because the next regularly scheduled Parliamentary elections were supposed to have taken place in 2019. But when Tsipras resigned, this triggered new elections.
All 300 seats within the Greek parliament are up for election. Voter registration is automatic and voting is mandatory in Greece. 10 recognized parties are on the ballot. Write-ins are allowed.
Polling shows a deadlock between Tsipras' LEFT SYRIZA party and Meimorakis' RIGHT ND party, but neither of them are anywhere close to an absolute majority, both with high-water marks at between 32%-33%, which means that a ruling coalition would have to be built out of a combination of 2 or more parties. SYRIZA has lead in 11 of the last 16 polls, all conducted since September 14th onward. There has been one mathematical tie and ND has won four polls. They are all around MoE = +/-4 to +/-5, so it's all pretty much a tossup.
The third place party, at around 7% or so, is XA ("Golden Dawn"), which is a neo-nazi party and it is extremely disturbing to find such a party doing this well. In 4th place is PO TOPAMI ("The River"), which is slightly more centrist and running an established, hard-nosed Journalist as it's candidate. Friends of mine in Germany consider TO POTAMI and Theodorakis (their standard bearer) to be the future of Greece: Euro-friendly and centrist.
I got a chuckle out of this headline in one of Germany's most respected news-outlets, ARD-Tagesschau:
"May the least useless of them win"
It seems that anger and apathy in elections is not just an American phenomenon, after all.
Actually, this thread could make for a good discussion as to whether this aspect of the parliamentary system of elections is good or bad: with a resignation from the top or a vote of NO CONFIDENCE in the ruling leader within a parliamentary system, most all countries that use this system automatically call for new elections. Germany's Gerhärd Schröder (SPD, Bundeskanzler 1998-2005) did this in 2005 when he deliberately asked for a vote of NO CONFIDENCE from his own party in order to move the parliamentary elections from 2006 UP to 2005, thinking that he then had a better chance of beating the CDU, with Angela Merkel as their designated choice for Chancellor. Well, it didn't work and Angela has now been Chancellorin of Germany for 10 years.
This is one thing that I think we Americans can be very, very proud of: our national elections, either presidential or congressional mid-term elections - have gone on continuously, uninterrupted, exactly every two years, since 1790, for 224 years straight. We had a presidential election in 1789 and a congressional election in 1789, but the calendar for even-numbers years was then set to start in 1790, so there were also congressional elections immediately again, in 1790. This is a type of consistency that Europeans cannot boast about. When President Richard M. Nixon resigned in disgrace in August of 1974, nothing on the election cycles itself was changed at all: the upcoming mid-term elections were held and Gerald R. Ford, the first non-elected Vice-President of the USA, succeeded to the Presidency as the first non-elected president. No special presidential election was called for 1974. The next regularly scheduled Presidential election happened exactly as scheduled, in 1976.
The top link will also record the election returns as they come in.
-Stat
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