Electoral Panorama / Panorama Electoral

Greece holds an early parliamentary election on Sunday, September 16, 2007. Elections to the Hellenic Parliament (Vouli) has an overview of Greece's electoral system, with results of Greek general elections since 1996. Greece's snap parliamentary election of 2007 - trial by (wild) fire?, in Global Economy Matters, has further information on the event, while Edward Hugh puts The Greek Economy Under The Microscope.

Today's election will be held under a new electoral law passed by the outgoing Pan Hellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) government in early 2004, which provides for a majority bonus of forty seats (out of a total of 300) for the popular vote winner at the nationwide level; the remaining 260 seats (including 12 nationwide seats and 248 multi-member constituency seats) will be initially allocated by the largest remainder (Hare) method of PR. The legal provisions covering the upcoming elections to the Vouli are contained in Presidential Decree 96/2007 (available in Greek here; link to the Ministry of the Interior, Public Administration and Decentralization).

Under the new system - which retains the existing three percent nationwide threshold - parties could win up to 87% of the seats they would receive under full proportionality (260 of 300 mandates being 86.7% of the total number of Vouli seats), as opposed to 70% under the old law. At the same time, the 40-seat majority prize means a single party could win an absolute parliamentary majority with as little as 42% of the nationwide vote.

Although the new electoral law was enacted in 2004 just before the election held that year, it did not come into effect at the time because the parliamentary majority voting in favor of the law did not reach the two-thirds required by the constitution for the immediate application of a new electoral system. Had the new electoral law been in place for the 2004 election and had voters cast their ballots the same way, the distribution of Vouli seats in the election would have been as follows: New Democracy (ND), 164; PASOK, 111; Communist Party of Greece (KKE), 16; and Coalition of the Left, the Movements and the Ecology (SYN), 9. Compared to the actual 2004 election outcome, ND would have lost just one seat but PASOK would have lost six, while KKE would have gained four seats and SYN would have won three additional mandates.