Maverick party picks up just one vote
One of the 36 parties and alliances that contested Sunday’s election received just one vote.
With 99.7 percent of votes counted, the Greek Ecologists party of veteran election maverick Dimosthenis Vergis picked up a single ballot, in his own constituency of Athens I.
Election observers expressed surprise that the fringe party did not pick up a second vote, given that its leader’s wife, Svetlana Lisagor Vergis, was also a candidate in the same constituency.
The result represents by far the worst performance for Vergis in the 15 elections he has contested unsuccessfully since 1993, apart from the national elections in 2019, when he received no votes. Due to financial reasons, he was unable to foot the cost of printing ballot papers for his party even though he contested that election.
In the 2004 European elections, the evergreen candidate picked up almost 33,000 votes.
His party, once described by a government minister as a “joke,” is not to be confused with the Ecologist Greens, which polled over 35,000 votes on Sunday, taking a 0.6% share.
