Greek Polls Show...

Greek Polls Show Gains by Right-Leaning New Democracy

By SUZANNE DALEY

Published: May 28, 2012

ATHENS — Four opinion polls conducted last week in Greece found that a right-leaning political party that has largely advocated staying the course under the harsh terms of the country’s financial rescue plan had surged ahead of its leftist competitor in popularity.

Stock markets here and around the world inched higher Monday after the news, but experts here cautioned against reading too much into the results. They warned that Greek voters were still changing their minds on

an almost daily basis and that the leftist party, Syriza, which has promised a wholescale renegotiation of the terms of the austerity plan, could also take the election scheduled for June 17.

The polls, conducted last week, found that the right-leaning New Democracy, which last month campaigned saying Greece risked being thrown out of the euro zone if it failed to abide by the terms of the rescue plan, now had around a quarter of the vote, or perhaps a bit more.

More recently, the leader of New Democracy, Antonis Samaras, has softened his message, suggesting that tweaks to the agreement need to be made. He still maintains that unilateral abandonment of the pact would would lead to default and chaos.

But the polls also found that support for Syriza — whose energetic young leader, Alexis Tsipras, has called for the abandonment of the austerity plan — has also grown, to a quarter of the electorate or a little less. Experts cautioned that the field was still extremely volatile. Kostas Panagopoulos, the head of the polling company Alco, said 6 out of 10 Greeks had changed their party affiliation between 2009 and the last vote of May 6.

That vote produced a highly a splintered finish that left the parties unable to form a government and the rest of Europe reeling.

Now, Mr. Panagopoulos said, he expected one out of four Greeks to vote differently within the passage of six weeks.

“You can see moves in every direction,” he said, noting that even some far-right extremists were turning to Syriza as they tried to game the outcome of the next month’s election.

The polls showed that fear was the largest motivator behind the support for New Democracy, Mr. Panagopoulos said. “The dividing line in Greece for many years was left or right,” he said. “But the new line is for or against the memorandum.”

Surveys continue to show that the vast majority of Greeks want to stay in the euro zone. But increasingly, experts say, they appear to believe that is still possible to negotiate a new plan that gives some relief to the country, now in its fifth year of recession and with more than 20 percent of the population out of work. This is the promise that Mr. Tsipras is holding out.

On a recent evening, about 150 people gathered to meet Syriza representatives in the central square of Gerakas, a suburb of Athens.

Among them was Sotiria Spioti, 39, who had not voted in 10 years, but she said she was considering voting for Mr. Tsipras. A divorced mother of two, she still has a job making candy but barely scrapes by.

“I’m not sure that I even trust him,” she said. “But to me, voting for him is a vote for hope. So maybe that is worth doing.”

Some of Mr. Tsipras’s supporters find it amusing that European leaders should disdain him while making appearances with members of New Democracy and the socialist party Pasok, since the two parties have gone back and forth ruling Greece for more than three decades and are squarely responsible for its troubles. “It is another reason to vote for Tsipras,” said Thanasis Pailotis, 55, an unemployed contractor who was also attending the assembly.

Mr. Tsipras has endured attacks in the mainstream press here, but he has been able to spread his message on on smaller television networks, suggesting that the salary cuts and tax hikes in the agreement are stifling any chance of an economic resurgence.

Unlike members of Greece’s older parties, which signed the rescue plan, his organization has been able to hold assemblies in Athens neighborhoods without risking bodily harm.

“The others can’t even hang out in cafes or they will get beaten,” said Christoforos Vernardakis, a political analyst at the University of Thessaloniki. “They hold tiny gatherings where the police guarding them are the attendees.”