Maverick party leader seeks his only voter to buy him dinner

Demosthenis Vergis, founder of Greek Ecologists party, has been surprised to find out that one single voter cast a ballot for his party in his own constituency of Athens A in the North.

“I’m looking for my only voter in order to thank him and buy him a dinner,” Vergis told newspaper protothema on Monday.

He added that neither he nor his wife voted for their party as they were on vacations on Mykonos over the weekend.

“It has happened in the past that I participated in national elections and did not get even a single vote. Now I got at least one,” Vergis noted.

It is important for him to be with the man who gave him the one vote and the 36th place in the elections.

He underlined that he wants to locate the ballot to keep it as a souvenir.

 

His party, one of the 36 parties and alliances that contested at Sunday’s election, run only in Athens I for financial reasons.

“In order to participate across the entire territory, one needs 150,000 euros, money that I no longer had the desire to spend. So me and my wife paid a fee of 300 euros for our participation, but only for Athens A’ constituency”, he explained.

As an environmentalist, the president of the Greek Environmentalists hopes that at some point the voting will be done electronically.

“For years I have been making a big protest, about the destruction of the environment that is marked by the thousands of trees that are cut down, in order to make paper for ballot papers and posters. The elections must be held electronically, something that only Kyriakos Mitsotakis can achieve, because he promotes and believes in green development, ” Vergis added.

Election observers expressed surprise that the fringe party did not pick up a second vote, given that the president’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.

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.