Yanis Varoufakis’ MeRA25 party – known throughout western Europe as the Diem25 movement – appears exactly at 3-percent threshold (of valid votes) required for representation in the European Parliament, two days after elections for the body were held in Greece.
With 93.76 percent of the vote counted as of early Tuesday afternoon, the likelihood of first-place ND eventually taking the seat from the former Greek finance minister’s MeRA25 party increased.
If the party falls shy of the 3-percent mark, then ND candidate – and former Potami party MP – Giorgos Amyras will head to Brussels instead of Sofia Sakorafa.
Sakorafa is an incumbent for the Europarliament, as she was elected as a MEP 2014, but on SYRIZA party’s ticket. She later left that party after the Tsipras government and most SYRIZA MPs acquiesced to creditors’ demands in the summer of 2015 and passed a third successive bailout memorandum for the country. The third memorandum was approved by a majority of opposition MPs as well.
At last count for Sunday’s election, ND was at 33.12 percent; SYRIZA 23.8 percent; Kinima Allaghis 7.69 percent; the Communist Party (KKE) 5.38 percent; Golden Dawn 4.86 percent and Elliniki Lysi 4.15 percent.
If the figures remain roughly the same, then center-right ND will have eight seats in the European Parliament; six for hard left SYRIZA; two for the social democrat grouping Kinima; two for KKE; two for ultra-nationalist GD and a sole seat for Elliniki Lysi (Greek solution) in its electoral debut.
In a related political development on Tuesday, one of the deputies picked up by SYRIZA midway through its four-year term, Theodora Megaloikonomou, notified the Parliament president that she was resigning from the ruling party’s Parliament group, but remaining as an independent in the last month of the current plenum.
She was elected from the Union of Centrists back in September 2015.
