A stunning election result for Greece’s prime minister

There is beating your political opponent, there is trouncing him, and then there is what Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Greece’s prime minister, did on May 21st to Alexis Tsipras, the leader of the radical-left Syriza party. Syriza ran the country from 2015 to 2019, a time when Greece came close to defaulting on its debts, crashing out of the euro and threatening the stability of the entire euro zone. Mr Mitsotakis then took over. Now Greek voters have decided, by a whopping margin, that they prefer stability and technocratic competence to drama.Mr Mitsotakis picked up 41% of the vote to Syriza’s 20%, a stunning result, especially given that pollsters had predicted only a six- or seven-point gap. Mr Tsipras’s future, and that of his party, are now in doubt. Yanis Varoufakis, the shaven-headed, leather-jacketed finance minister who propelled Syriza down the path of confrontation with Brussels but then quit and formed his own splinter party, is out of parliament. Mr Mitsotakis fell a few seats short of an overall majority. But he says he has no interest in forming a coalition; and no one else can. So a second election will be held, probably on June 25th; an interim prime minister will hold the reins until then. Mr Mitsotakis is sure to be back, because the next election will be held under a new electoral system that will reward the largest party, presumably his right-of-centre New Democracy, with up to 50 bonus seats, out of a parliamentary total of 300.