ATHENS, March 7: Greece's opposition conservatives won general elections by a comfortable margin on Sunday, ending more than 10 years of rule by the country's socialist party, exit polls indicated.
If the results are confirmed, the conservative New Democracy Party will achieve a solid majority in the 300-strong parliament, running the country during the Athens Olympic Games in August and seeing through talks to reunify the divided island of Cyprus, in which Greece and arch-rival Turkey are involved.
According to six exit polls released by Greece's television channels, New Democracy scored between 44.5 and 47.5 percentage points, compared with 38.8-42.5 points for the governing Socialist PASOK party. The exit polls' margin of error is 1.5 percent.
Official results are expected late in the evening. PASOK governed Greece for 19 out of the last 22 years. But polls showed recently that voters could be ready for change.
Late polls published two weeks ahead of the poll gave New Democracy a three-percent lead. Trailing in opinion polls by eight percentage points in January, the Socialists tried to make a fresh start by surprisingly replacing their leader, Prime Minister Costas Simitis, 67, by the country's Foreign Minister George Papandreou, 51.
PASOK's Papandreou is the son of the party's late founder and former prime minister Andreas Papandreou. New Democracy is led by 47-year old lawyer Costas Karamanlis. Karamanlis is the nephew of New Democracy's late founder Constantine Karamanlis, who served as prime minister in the 1950s and 1970s and steered Greece into the then European Community in 1979.
Under his stewardship, New Democracy has discarded its confrontational image that turned off Greek voters since 1993. Karamanlis has embarked on reclaiming the political centre from the socialists, who dominated it under the outgoing moderate Prime Minister Costas Simitis. -AFP
