New democracy and centre-right dominance in Greece: a new normal?

In the parliamentary elections of 2023, the ruling New Democracy (ND) party of prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis was re-elected triumphantly. ND’s victory marks an unprecedented moment of centre-right dominance in Greece since 1974 and goes against the trend of the so-called ‘crisis of the centre-right’ elsewhere in Europe. This article claims that ND’s strategy under Mitsotakis has been typical of the winning formula of other centre-right parties in Europe in previous decades. Yet, that this formula is now so successful in Greece owes much to the country’s post-crisis context, out of which the Mitsotakis leadership emerged. Given the geopolitical position of Greece and the historical intertwining of the question of its international orientation with major cleavages of domestic politics, the article argues that the success of Mitsotakis draws particularly on a certain form of posturing in foreign and European policy that allows him to reconcile contradictions inside ND’s electoral coalition.