Greek voters head to polls for key election amid austerity crisis

Page last updated at 04:50 GMT, Sunday, May 6, 2012 - 09:50 EST

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Voters in Greece headed to the polls Sunday to take part in parliamentary elections amid wide uncertainty over what government will emerge and how it will handle the austerity crisis gripping the nation.

No party is expected to win a majority of the vote, meaning a coalition will again have to be formed.

The outgoing coalition government pushed through a series of painful austerity measures in order to secure emergency bailout funding for Greece, which is at the center of the eurozone debt crisis.

The two main parties that formed that coalition in November, PASOK and New Democracy, are expected to lose votes to a raft of smaller parties as people express their unhappiness at their country's economic plight.

Campaigning came to a close on Friday.

Evangelos Venizelos, leader of the left-leaning PASOK party, declared "everything is at stake Sunday," as he addressed a final campaign rally in the capital's central Syntagma Square, scene of many anti-austerity protests.

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Comments

Today's elections brought the

May 6, 2012 by Ilias Sourdis (China ), 1 year 2 weeks ago

Today's elections brought the Greek voters to the crossroads leading to nowhere.
It appears that Greeks will vote just to exercise their constitutional duty and not to support the platform of a specific political party.
Many of the voters will just go to the polling stations only to cast an angry vote to punish the two major parties hoping to clip weaken them and end the monopoly of power for the past several decades.
Unfortunately for the Greek electorate, even the smaller political parties never assumed seriously their role in the Greece political arena, they are going completely unprepared and empty handed to the Greek voters which will result to miss a huge opportunity to win this election and steer the country towards a different direction.
With lack of political vision and solutions to the present problems for a better tomorrow by both small and big parties. they are to the polling stations offering nothing more than a nice colorful menu with the logo, colors, pictures of their political leaders, and under it the words "WE WILL SAVE GREECE" (without any specifics) but not a single dish specified for the Greek voters to chose.

Therefore whatever the outcome of this exercise will be insignificant and the next day will not look better than today.

Despite the above justifiable pessimism, we still wish good luck to our home country Greece.