With early results showing a resounding victory for the centre-right New Democracy (ND) in the first round of elections in Greece, its beaming leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis addressed a cheering crowd outside the party’s headquarters with the words ‘All of Greece has turned blue! Thank you!’. He has every reason to be satisfied. ND not only managed to hold on to its share of the vote from 2019 but to expand it by around 150,000 votes, bringing them to a comfortable 41 per cent. They won every district across the country but one.

While just shy of a majority, due to the changes in electoral law introduced by Syriza while in government, they are poised to win comfortably in the second round which will follow in late June or early July. Fought under a different set of rules, this rerun could grant ND over 180 seats in the parliament of 300, giving it an indisputable mandate and the power to radically reshape the country’s institutions.

Is there any future for the populist left-wing movements that challenged the status quo in the 2010s?

Last night’s results will almost definitely prove to be a seismic shift in the nation’s political landscape, in part because of what happened around ND’s victory. Syriza, the party that epitomised the European far-left’s surge across Europe in the past decade, managed only 20 per cent. If these results repeat themselves in the second round, the party’s leadership will most likely resign. With no clear successors, this is likely to be a death blow for the party that aspired to replace the socialist Pasok party as the main contender against ND in Greece’s two-party system.

This happened despite the dozens of scandals that have peppered ND’s tenure: The party’s handling of the pandemic was disastrous. Police violence is now rife. Freedom of the press is in the pits. The state’s emergency response has proven to be lacking again and again. Meanwhile, the lack of investment in the country’s infrastructure caused the greatest train tragedy the country has seen and for which the government was blamed directly. Despite all that, it’s Syriza – the once-reigning party of the left that sent shockwaves through the EU in 2014 – that is staring at an impending collapse.

ND on the other hand has demonstrated remarkable resilience. Attempting to unravel the factors that contributed to its triumph amidst controversy will be tricky. There are however hints that its voters are convinced by the party’s modest success in the economy, now one of the highest performing in Europe (at least on paper). And counter-intuitively, Syriza was punished for how ineffective it proved to be at holding them to account for the aforementioned scandals. While abstention is on a similar level as in 2014, when Syriza emerged as the winner, this time it seems they were hit the hardest.

Syriza’s decline from its ground-shifting position in 2014 to its current state of disarray marks the end of a major political cycle that began with the 2008 banking crisis. The party leadership’s looming resignation and the absence of clear successors raise critical questions about Syriza’s future, with potential consequences that extend beyond Greece, and into the broader European political landscape. Is there any future for the populist left-wing movements that challenged the status quo in the 2010s? It seems increasingly doubtful.

A further sign that we might be looking at a post-populist order is the failure of Yanis Varoufakis’ party MeRA25 to cross the minimum threshold for entry. The firebrand economist was the most popular candidate of the 2015 election, with almost 85,000 votes in Athens’s 2nd district where he stood. Yesterday, running in Athens’ 1st district, he received ten times less.

Is this the return of the old guard? It seems like it, looking at Pasok’s resurgence. With ‘Pasokification’ once a synonym for political decline, the party managed to increase its share of the vote by 40 per cent since the last elections. There is now talk that the second round might see them coming neck to neck with Syriza, or even overtaking them for the second place. A lot of this comes down to the party’s new leader, Nikos Androulakis.

Since taking over in late 2021, Androulakis has proven to be quietly effective, taking advantage of the scandal surrounding the surveillance of politicians’ and journalists’ phones by the Greek Intelligence Service (of which he was the primary victim) to boost his name recognition. He has also sidelined toxic elements inside Pasok that were associated with the worst excesses of the 90s and 00s, slowly cleaning up the party’s image. If the party manages to get to second place, Androulakis will definitely become a major player in the country’s politics for the next decade.

The implications of these results for the country’s electorate and political leaders are profound and far-reaching. How did ND manage to win the majority of the youth vote? How did they manage to flip every district, even ones traditionally held by the left for many decades? Syriza’s strategists will be poring over these questions in the coming weeks. The European right will be doing the same, looking for valuable lessons. While it’s too early to safely say what those will be, we’re definitely looking at a completely new political landscape and a major turn for Greek and European politics.