Greece’s Battered Conservatives Square Off in Leadership Fight

Incumbent Vagelis Meimarakis faces rivals for job of raising New Democracy party from Sept. 20 election defeat to Alexis Tsipras’s left-wing Syriza

The Wall Street Journal

By STELIOS BOURAS

Updated Oct. 2, 2015 5:24 p.m. ET

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ATHENS—Greece’s opposition conservative party, New Democracy, launched a leadership contest on Friday after its recent heavy election defeat to Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’s Syriza.

Rival candidates nominated themselves to lead New Democracy’s challenge against the ruling left-wing Syriza in a party vote expected by mid-November. The contest could determine how strongly Greece’s conservatives push for market-oriented overhauls to free up the sclerotic Greek economy.

Incumbent conservative leader Vagelis Meimarakis, who was at the party’s helm when it lost the Sept. 20 elections, will be up against the younger, Harvard-educated Kyriakos Mitsotakis and relative newcomer Apostolos Tzitzikostas, the governor of a province in northern Greece.

Former Deputy Development Minister Adonis Georgiadis had also thrown his hat into the ring but his candidacy was rejected late on Friday because he submitted his application a few minutes after the deadline expired. Mr. Georgiadis, an outsider for the leadership bid, said he would appeal the decision.

New Democracy is the country’s second-largest party and the main challenger to Syriza, which has governed Greece for most of 2015. The conservative party was in power from mid-2012 until January but has now lost two straight election encounters to the leftists this year.

Former Prime Minister Antonis Samaras stepped down as New Democracy’s head in July after failing to convince referendum voters to support austerity measures demanded by Greece’s lenders, other eurozone countries and the International Monetary Fund.

Mr. Samaras was succeeded by Mr. Meimarakis, 61, who took over as an interim leader and stayed on when Mr. Tsipras called snap elections for September. Despite losing those elections by a clear margin of seven percentage points, Mr. Meimarakis is seen in New Democracy as being a uniting figure in one of Greece’s oldest and largest political groups.

Backed by party heavyweights including former Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis, Mr. Meimarakis starts the leadership race as the favorite, according to some party officials and analysts.

A senior party official who backs him said that despite his electoral defeat last month, Mr. Meimarakis helped raise the party’s support among voters during the campaign and with more time would have done more.

But critics say Mr. Meimarakis’s populist style, which appeals to Greek nationalists, and his status as a party veteran could push away the middle-ground voters New Democracy needs to defeat Mr. Tsipras and Syriza.

“If New Democracy limits itself to securing support from the right wing, then it will not pose any threat to Syriza. The only thing that will be able to hurt Mr. Tsipras will be his own mistakes,” said John Dimakis, a political analyst at STR, an Athens-based communications consultancy.

The fight for swing voters is where Mr. Mitsotakis, aged 47, may have the edge over Mr. Meimarakis.

Mr. Mitsotakis briefly served as a minister under Mr. Samaras, who gave him the difficult task of reforming Greece’s Byzantine public administration. He is a strong supporter of opening up the economy to greater competition, a stance that appeals to many Greeks who support freer markets.

Mr. Mitsotakis’s biggest problem, he has admitted, is his name. A scion of one of Greece’s leading political families—his father Constantine was prime minister for two years in the early 1990s—he would have to convince voters that he represents a break from the country’s political old guard, which voters widely blame for mismanagement over recent decades leading to Greece’s crippling debt crisis since 2009.

The widespread desire for new faces might benefit Mr. Tzitzikostas, analysts say, but he is also untested in national politics.

Little separates the conservative candidates in their stances on Greece’s latest international bailout plan. New Democracy has already voted in parliament for the program of economic overhauls demanded by Greece’s creditors.

Whoever ends up leading New Democracy will have to overcome the stigma attached to the party for agreeing to and implementing Greece’s unpopular second bailout plan from 2012 to 2014. If the current Syriza-led government completes its full four-year term, which rarely happens in Greece, then the new conservative leader would have until September 2019 to catch up with Mr. Tsipras in popularity.

Write to Stelios Bouras at stelios.bouras@wsj.com