Antonis Samaras and Dora Bakoyannis today go into potentially their last week of campaigning for the New Democracy leadership with the former culture minister, Samaras, still showing a steady lead in the latest opinion poll.

ND members are due to vote for their next party president this Sunday but if neither candidate receives more than 50 percent of the ballots cast, a second round will be held the following Saturday.

According to a Public Issue survey for Sunday’s Kathimerini, Samaras has a sound lead over Bakoyannis, as 44.5 percent of ND supporters who claim they will vote at the end of the week said they would back him. Support for Bakoyannis is running at 36 percent.

However, these figures would not be enough to get Samaras elected in the first round. The third candidate, Thessaloniki Prefect Panayiotis Psomiadis, would drop out for the second round and, according to the poll, the ex-culture minister would get 49 percent of the vote and Bakoyannis 44 percent, which would make Samaras Costas Karamanlis’s successor. Speaking in Larissa, central Greece, yesterday Samaras said that the conservatives should seek three things: unity, organization and ideology. “When we have all these, there is no way that PASOK can take us on and we are 100 percent guaranteed to win,” he said.

Following the infighting of the past couple of weeks, Samaras was keen to emphasize that he and Bakoyannis, as well as Psomiadis, were not rivals but part of the same team and that ND’s real opponent was PASOK. Bakoyannis, speaking in Thessaloniki yesterday, also turned her fire on PASOK, accusing the Socialist government of “losing control in all areas.” However, the ex-foreign minister warned conservatives that “electing a party leader with old ideas is a recipe for failure.”