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Greece's conservative New Democracy party won a landslide victory in the country's second election in five weeks Sunday, official projections based on early returns showed, gaining enough parliamentary seats to form a government for a second four-year term.
Kyriakos Mitsotakis' party is projected to win 40.5% of the vote, with his main rival, the left-wing Syriza party, suffering a crushing defeat with just under 18% projected support, even worse than its 20% in the last elections in May.
Sunday's vote came just over a week after a migrant ship capsized and sank off the western coast of Greece, leaving hundreds of people dead and missing and calling into question the actions of Greek authorities and the country's strict migration policy. But the disaster, one of the worst in the Mediterranean in recent years, did not affect the election, with domestic economic issues at the forefront of voters' minds.
The projections indicate Mitsotakis' party will win enough of Parliament's 300 seats to form a stable government thanks to a change in the electoral law that grants the winning party bonus seats. The previous election in May, conducted under a proportional representation system, left him five seats short of a majority despite winning 41% of the vote.
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