ATHENS -- Greek conservatives won at the polls Sunday in a national election but fell far short of enough seats to take power, deadlocking parliament and deepening unease over the country’s economic future and its continued membership in the Eurozone.With 30% of the votes counted, Antonis Samaras and his center-right New Democracy party had 20.3% of the vote, far from the support needed to secure an outright majority in Greece’s 300-seat parliament. The Socialists took a brutal beating, with support for their new leader and former Greek finance minister, Evangelos Venizelos, plummeting to 14.1%, down a shocking 30 percentage points from the party’s landslide victory in 2009.
Anger over punishing austerity cuts pushed voters to a number of protest parties, including the hard-left Syriza party, which unseated scores of Socialist and conservative backbenchers, and the far-right Golden Dawn party, whose anti-immigrant stand and thuggish tactics have sparked widespread concern.
The messy electoral result could take weeks to untangle, at a time when Europe’s debt crisis threatens to flare up again.
Samaras, as the leader of the projected top vote-getting party, will have three days to try to form a coalition before passing on the task to the runner-up party. The endeavor could prove tricky: Samaras has already said that he would rather force another election than join in a coalition with Venizelos, his archrival.
And even if they formed an alliance with the help of a third, smaller party, it would probably be short-lived, pundits and politicians here said.
“We’re looking at the end of a political era in which the conservative and Socialists dominated the political spectrum,” said Dimitris Mavros, managing director of the MRB polling group. “Voter intent [was] clear: to demolish that system and produce a new, highly fragmented political kaleidoscope.”
"This is a seismic shift in politics here," Mavros said.
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