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Greece live: Alexis Tsipras to resign and call September snap electionEmbattled prime minister is set to stand down after losing backing from his MPs over Greece's punishing new bail-out agreement
Greece's Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has announced he is resigning and has called an early election.Mr Tsipras, who was only elected in January, said he had a moral duty to go to the polls now a third bailout had been secured with European creditors.The election date is yet to be set but earlier reports suggested 20 September. Mr Tsipras said he would seek the Greek people's approval to continue his government's programme.Greece will be run by a caretaker government ahead of the polls.If a government resigns within a year of election, the constitution requires the president to ask the second-largest party - in this case the conservative New Democracy - to try to form an administration.If this fails, the next largest party must be given a chance.Analysts say both parties can waive this and allow the president to approve the snap election.However, New Democracy leader Vangelis Meimarakis said it was his "political obligation and responsibility to exhaust all the options", even though the numbers suggest he has little chance.Mr Tsipras had won power on a manifesto of opposing the stringent austerity conditions that he has now accepted.He said he was forced to do so because a majority of Greeks wanted to stay in the eurozone, and this could not be achieved in any other way.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel told her Brazilian counterpart, Dilma Rousseff that “Tsipras stepping down is part of the solution, not part of the crisis,” Rousseff told reporters in Brasilia.
The 41-year-old Greek leader is still popular with voters for having at least tried to stand up to the country’s creditors and his leftwing Syriza party is likely to be returned to power in the imminent general election.
Anti-euro, pro-drachma party Popular Unity told: form a government if you canParty formed after split from Alexis Tsipras’s Syriza, unlikely to succeedA previous attempt by Evangelos Meimarakis, who heads the centre-right New Democracy party, ended in failure earlier on Monday after he was unable to muster the necessary MPs for a working majority in the 300-member parliament.Many Greeks would not want to see their country exit the euro area – a course Popular Unity believes would be preferable to the stringent terms set as the condition for remaining in the euro – but they have been shocked by Syriza’s embrace of the policies it had pledged to oppose. The prospect of Greece being plunged into further instability was reinforced by leading Syriza cadres who said the crisis-plagued country may well be forced to go to elections again if next month’s vote is inconclusive.
Greek President Prokopis Pavlopoulos is expected on Friday to call a snap election for next month, an official at the presidency told Reuters, ending fruitless coalition efforts among parties deeply divided over the country's new bailout.Following last week's resignation of leftist Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, Pavlopoulos asked a conservative and a radical left leader to try to form a new government and thereby avoid another election just seven months after the previous poll.The official stressed on Wednesday that the timetable could still change, but said Pavlopoulos intended to appoint a caretaker premier, Supreme Court judge Vassiliki Thanou, on Friday. Thanou would become Greece's first female prime minister, albeit briefly."The same day the president will announce the election date and it will probably be Sept. 20," the official said.SYRIZA says it is aiming for an outright majority, although the strength of its support is unclear due to a lack of surveys by leading pollsters in the past month. Last week, 25 out of SYRIZA's 149 lawmakers walked out to form a new anti-bailout party.
Fifty-three members of SYRIZA's central committee, including Euro MP Nikos Chountis, resigned Wednesday slamming the leftist party's U-turn on its election promises.The 53 are expected to join Popular Unity, the newly-formed SYRIZA splinter party led by former energy minister Panayiotis Lafazanis.
First female prime minister for Greece announcedVassiliki Thanou, president of the country’s supreme court, will head the caretaker government until the elections, expected next month
Former Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras' leftist Syriza will emerge as the biggest party after next month's election but without the sizeable margin it was hoping for, the first major opinion poll since he resigned last week showed.The poll also found that almost two thirds of voters felt Tsipras should not have sought a fresh mandate and that his favored coalition ally would not make it into parliament, suggesting his gamble to call early elections to consolidate his power base could backfire.Syriza was supported by 23 percent of those polled, with the conservative New Democracy party second on 19.5 percent, according to the survey, carried out by pollsters ProRata and published in Friday's Efimerida Ton Syntakton newspaper.The previous ProRata poll in early July showed a wider gap in Syriza's favor, putting the party on 26 percent compared with 15 percent for New Democracy.Based on the survey, 64 percent of Greeks believe Tsipras's move to call snap polls was wrong, while 68 percent agreed that Greece must stay in the euro zone at any cost, even if that meant further austerity.
Greece's Syriza party falls behind conservatives in latest poll
Alexis Tsipras faces shock election defeat as voters on course to punish Syriza at the ballot boxNeutered Leftist party set to lose power to pro-euro conservatives on September 20, according to latest polls
A flurry of late polls on Friday appeared to show Greece’s election shifting in favour of Alexis Tsipras’ leftist Syriza party, as the former prime minister prepared to address the party faithful in a final rally before the weekend vote. His conservative rival remained within spitting distance, however, after a three-week campaign in which the two men’s ratings have rarely been more than a half a point apart. None of the surveys suggested either Tsipras or New Democracy leader Vangelis Meimarakis would win an outright majority in Sunday’s election, setting the scene for coalition talks once the result becomes clear early on Monday. Tsipras led in six polls released on Friday evening -- the last day in which polling and campaign are allowed -- trending further ahead of conservatives and with the last poll giving him a 2.5 percentage point lead. Meimarakis won a single poll on Friday, the first of the day. The evening shift appeared to back Tsipras’ earlier claim that there was a large group of silent supporters ready to vote for Syriza. "There is a voting body that is below the radar, it is not being traced," Tsipras told Greece’s ANT 1 television. Neither party is expected to secure the roughly 38 percent vote share needed for a majority in the 300-seat parliament, meaning a coalition is a near certainty.
Greek elections live: Tsipras vows to form new government after opposition concedes defeatVoter turnout could be the lowest in history with Syriza emerge as clear victors. Follow for latest updates from Athens
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