Greek Election Battle in Final Days With Syriza Leading

By Eleni Chrepa, Bloomberg

The election contest between Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras and opposition leader Alexis Tsipras moved into its final stretch, with Tsipras’s anti-bailout Syriza party maintaining its lead before voting day on Jan. 25.

Two separate surveys by the Alco and Rass polling companies published Wednesday in Athens showed a lead of as much as 4.9 percentage points for Syriza, or the Coalition of the Radical Left, over the premier’s New Democracy party.

Greece’s next government will have to decide on extending the international bailout program that expires at the end of February, with the country set to run out of cash by the end of June at the latest. While voters are attracted by a Syriza platform which includes opposing the terms attached to the aid, investors have been spooked by the implications of a potential Tsipras victory. 

“Syriza’s policies will lead the country to a euro exit and to new bailout deals,” Samaras said in a speech Wednesday night in Thessaloniki, the main city in northern Greece. Seeking to close the poll gap, he repeated that his party is ready to seal all pending deals with its creditors.

“There is nothing now that can hold back the great desire of Greek people to reverse the bailout regime,” Tsipras said on the campaign trail in Patras in the south of the country the same day. The opposition leader said his party is committed to tax relief, canceling a property tax imposed by Samaras’s government, safeguarding Greek bank deposits and putting an end to mortgage foreclosures.
Podemos in Athens

Tsipras is scheduled to deliver his main election speech this evening at Omonia square, in Athens. In a show of solidarity between European anti-austerity parties, Pablo Iglesias, the leader of Podemos of Spain, will join Tsipras on the podium.

Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, whose party trails Podemos in polls before a general election due at the end of this year, rallied to Samaras’s support with a visit to Athens earlier this month.

German Vice-Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel, asked by an audience member at the World Economic Forum in Davos today whether Greece should ditch austerity, said that he would advocate sticking to the course agreed so far.

“We have an agreement with Greece which is relatively fair,” said Gabriel, who is also German economy minister. “The voters in Greece are free to vote and afterwards we have to have a fair discussion with them, but also with our taxpayers and citizens.”

The two polls by Rass and Alco gave Syriza 31.2 percent and 32 percent respectively, compared with 27 percent and 27.1 percent for New Democracy. That suggests that even if Tsipras wins, he won’t have enough lawmakers for a majority in Greece’s 300-seat chamber.

The Rass poll of 1,003 people was conducted Jan. 19-20, with a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points. The Alco poll was carried out Jan. 18-20, with no details of sample size immediately available.