Over the past year Greece was swept by several serious waves of social discontent, triggered by various economic and social problems. And while strikes and demonstrations are nothing unusual in the life of Bulgaria’s southern neighbour, their scale was more significant than usual. Against this background, however, it is noteworthy that the public energy does not, at least for now, seem to be causing major shifts in the balance of forces among the country’s political parties.
Hundreds of thousands of people joined demonstrations across Greece on February 28, the second anniversary of the collision between two trains in the Tempe gorge near Larissa in 2023, which claimed the lives of 57 people, mostly youths. According to police estimates, more than 170,000 people took part in the protest in Athens alone, and around 325,000 across Greece.
The findings of the investigation into the causes of the tragedy were presented a day earlier. Alongside human error, the report pointed to delays in introducing the automated railway traffic management system. The demonstrators, however, said the investigation did not get to the whole truth and to who was responsible for the victims’ deaths.
The demonstrations were accompanied by a general strike, and the opposition tabled a motion of no confidence against the government of the centre-right New Democracy, which failed.
The unrest surrounding the anniversary of the crash had not yet subsided when it became known that the European Public Prosecutor’s Office had launched an investigation against 100 people accused of having unlawfully received subsidies for non-existent pastures. The scandal surrounding the Greek agency for agricultural payments OPEKEPE gradually grew in the following months, and the influential Migration and Asylum Minister Makis Voridis, a former Rural Development and Food Minister, was forced to resign. The investigations uncovered abuses amounting to tens of millions of EUR, dozens of people were detained, and some of them were convicted.
While the scandal unfolded for much of the year, in late November it entered an acute phase when mass protests erupted among farmers, who could not receive their subsidies on time because of the checks at OPEKEPE. Throughout December road transport in Greece was significantly hindered and at times even blocked by the obstruction points that farmers set up at a number of key locations on the road network, including border crossings, among them the border with Bulgaria.
Several times in 2025 Greece was also brought to a standstill by general strikes. The largest was on October 14 and involved employees from both the public and private sectors. It was directed against a bill allowing employers, under certain conditions, to extend the working day to 13 hours. The planned provisions also give employers greater flexibility in short-term hiring. Earlier nationwide strikes took place on August 28 and October 1, and workers in different sectors of the economy went on strike on various occasions throughout the year.
And while the heightened public tension created a sense that support for the centre-right government of Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis was wavering, it appears that the Greek opposition has so far failed to offer society a convincing alternative. A summary of opinion polls from the beginning to the end of 2025, compiled by the Greek section of CNN, shows that support for the governing party in surveys by different agencies stood at about 29% at the start of the year and was again the same towards its end. The polls even record a slight increase in support for New Democracy compared with the 2024 European Parliament election, when it received 28.3% of the vote.
The main opposition force, the centre-left PASOK, failed during the year to narrow the double-digit lead of New Democracy. After a brief rise in early 2025 to around 17% support, in April PASOK slipped to around 13% of potential voters and even fell to third place in their preferences, following the somewhat surprising rise of the Eurosceptic left-wing party Course of Freedom, mainly around the demonstrations marking the Tempe railway crash anniversary. PASOK later regained second place and stabilized at around 14%, but it does not appear to be emerging as a serious challenger to the governing party for the leading position in Greek politics.
The winners from the developments over the year appear to be Course of Freedom and the far-right Greek Solution, which consistently receive around 10% in Greeks’ preferences and surpass the traditionally strong Communist Party of Greece, which gathers around 8-9% support.
The decline continued during the year for the once governing left-wing party SYRIZA, which can now rely on the support of only about 6% of voters.
Polls show that three figures, who have not yet stated their political intentions clearly, could change the picture.
The first potential candidate to reshuffle the political deck in Greece next year is former prime minister (2015-2019) and former SYRIZA leader Alexis Tsipras. After paying the political price for two consecutive parliamentary election defeats in 2019 and 2023, he spent two years relatively far from the centre of public life. In October 2025, however, Tsipras left parliament, and earlier this month he presented his memoir Ithaca and hinted that he might take part in the creation of a new party. Polls indicate that Tsipras’s personal charisma may be stronger than support for SYRIZA, and in recent months have given a possible new party of his potential support ranging from 10% to 30%, with the latest surveys at year’s end putting its electoral potential between 18.7% and 23.2%.
Another figure who could change the political landscape is former prime minister (2012-2015) and former New Democracy leader Antonis Samaras. He is particularly influential in New Democracy’s right-conservative wing, but in November the tension between him and the current prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, which was never a secret, reached a breaking point and Samaras was removed from the party’s parliamentary group. Polls, however, show that a potential Samaras party could hypothetically gain between 10% and 16% support, a scenario that is not entirely improbable, given that Samaras has a history of breaking away: in 1992 he left the government and New Democracy, caused the fall of the government of Konstantinos Mitsotakis, the father of the current prime minister, and founded the party Political Spring.
The third person who could potentially bring serious change to the political landscape comes from completely different circles. This is Maria Karystianou, a 52-year-old paediatrician who came under the spotlight because of a personal tragedy. Her 19-year-old daughter Marti died in the Tempe railway crash in 2023, and Maria Karystianou gradually became a central figure in the movement led by relatives of the victims, which holds all major parties responsible for the tragedy. In mid-December, quoted by the Proto Thema weekly, Karystianou left open the possibility that the movement for justice for the Tempe victims might develop into a political party. According to the polls cited by CNN, such a party could potentially attract even more than 30% of voters.