‘Little Cuba’ in the Aegean: the communists won the municipal elections

People in Greece went to the polls again yesterday. In the second round of local elections, the ruling right-leaning New Democracy Party failed to achieve the success of the first round and lost the country’s two largest cities, Athens and Thessaloniki.

In the first round of elections held on October 8 for 262 municipalities in the country, none of the candidates obtained 43 percent of the votes, and a second round was held yesterday for 84 municipalities, including the capital Athens.

Kostas Bakoyannis, son of former Foreign Minister Dora Bakoyannis, older sister of Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and mayor of Athens, lost the presidency in the second round of elections.

Haris Dukas, the candidate supported by the center-left Panhellenic Socialist Action Party (PASOK), won the Athens mayoralty.

Dukas, who obtained 56 percent of the votes, left behind Bakoyannis, one of the strong names of New Democracy, with the support he received from the Radical Left Alliance (SYRIZA) in the second round.

“It was not a good night for New Democracy,” Mitsotakis said after the election results were announced. saying.

Stefanos Kasselakis, the new leader of the main opposition party SYRIZA, commented on New Democracy’s performance in the second round of elections, especially in the Athens Municipality, saying: “The Mitsotakis regime experienced its first major break tonight.” . he made the assessment of it.

THE COMMUNISTS TOOK THE THIRD LARGEST CITY

The increase in the votes of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) in the elections also attracted attention. The party, which won 6.86 percent of the vote in the 2019 local elections, increased its votes in these elections to more than 10 percent.

The current KKE president, who won 41 percent of the vote in the first round in Patra, the country’s third largest city, won the election with 56 percent in the second round.

The communists, who won 13 percent of the vote in the first round of the elections in Athens, missed out on the second round by 1.5 points.

Although the communists won 6 municipalities throughout the country, one of them was Ikaria (Ahikerya), one of the islands near Turkey.

RED ISLAND 30 MILES FROM Türkiye

On the island of Ikaria, just 30 miles off the coast of Kusadasi, Turkey, the KKE candidate won the election in the first round. In the 2019 elections, the KKE candidate won the island municipality.

The island, with a population of approximately 8,500, located just west of the island of Samos, is one of the places where the communists have traditionally been strong.

The island, which takes its name from the Greek mythology of Icarus, whose wings melted and fell because he flew too close to the sun, has an area of ​​255 square kilometers.

The island, which hosted approximately 13,000 Greek communists who were exiled after the Greek Civil War between 1946 and 1949, has been a place where the left is strong since those years.

Ikaria, where the communists won the elections in 2019, is also known as the “red rock” and the “red island.”

The island is also known as the place where the oldest people in Europe live.