Although Kyriakos Mitsotakis has a packed travel schedule in the coming weeks—with Abu Dhabi and a forum on AI organized by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi on the agenda these days—he is not turning his gaze away from domestic politics, given that the current year is clearly pre-election.

From this perspective, New Democracy is already working with an electoral horizon in mind, activating party machinery with the goal of achieving the greatest possible internal cohesion. At a time when the opposition space is fragmented and in flux—awaiting new parties from Alexis Tsipras and Maria Karystianou, and amid PASOK’s internal tensions—New Democracy wants to capitalize on its political advantage and its clear polling lead in order to narrow the gap toward the zone of single-party majority, even if that goal currently appears rather utopian.

Although cake-cutting events have a somewhat folkloric character—especially given that we are already in mid-February—the gathering scheduled for this afternoon at the Grand Hyatt Athens on Syngrou Avenue, organized by the governing party’s apparatus and featuring the prime minister as guest and speaker, is important so as to send to everyone a message of maximum alertness and unity for yet another first-place finish.

After all, even political opponents acknowledge that New Democracy knows how to fight elections, and it is on this that the party machine will now be tested, as it has already entered a phase of pre-conference consultations.

Pressure and overtures toward PASOK

While the prime minister is gradually activating party mechanisms, PASOK remains firmly on his radar—both in terms of political pressure and with an eye to the day after the elections and a possible need for governing partnerships. In this context, his pointed remark in Sunday’s post about Harilaou Trikoupi (PASOK headquarters), against the backdrop of the bill restoring collective labor agreements and PASOK’s stance in the vote, was no coincidence.

“I cannot fail to note PASOK’s paradoxical stance of voting in favor of all the bill’s core articles while at the same time voting against it in principle,” the prime minister emphasized. “I hope and wish that at some point, as a political system, we can approach with greater sincerity those things that can truly unite us, without inventing artificial differences simply to pretend that we are doing opposition,” he added.

It is clear that Kyriakos Mitsotakis wants to tap into all electoral reservoirs in the center, while also sending—implicitly but clearly—a message with an eye to the post-election period, when dilemmas will be posed differently.

New Democracy’s pre-conferences

Given Mitsotakis’s strategy of showcasing the government’s work over the past seven years, the thematic pre-conferences of New Democracy on the road to the party congress, to be held in May in Athens, are considered important for codifying a series of initiatives and projects implemented both nationally and locally over the previous period. This was also the spirit of the discussion the prime minister held with citizens on a panel at the first pre-conference in Ioannina.

Last Thursday, the congress organizing committee met for the first time under Theodore Roussopoulos, who has completed his international obligations and returned permanently to Greece. At a meeting held on Friday at the Maximos Mansion, plans were also set in motion for the next pre-conferences.

As previously reported by To Thema, the next meeting is scheduled for February 25 in Alexandroupoli, followed by pre-conferences in Patras, Heraklion, and Thessaloniki. Depending on the prime minister’s schedule and availability, another pre-conference may take place in Larissa or Lamia, and possibly on another island, until mid-May, when the central party congress is scheduled.

In this environment, the intervention by Nikos Dendias from Rodopi did not go unnoticed, as he highlighted the gap between the party’s footprint and that of the broader right-wing alignment. “Polls show a divergence between the alignment and the party’s electoral appeal. The party is the electoral expression of the alignment,” he said from Komotini. “This gap concerns me greatly. Therefore, within the effort toward the pre-conference dialogue and our congress in May, as the President said, we must find out why this gap exists and close it,” he added.