Prime Minister-elect Mitsotakis vows to make Greece proud

Greece’s conservative prime minister-elect Kyriakos Mitsotakis vowed that the country would “proudly” enter a post-bailout period of “jobs, security and growth” after winning a landslide victory in Sunday’s general election.

Official results showed Mitsotakis on track to crush leftist premier Alexis Tsipras, who oversaw austerity measures after Greece’s dramatic rescue by international creditors in the European debt crisis.

“A painful cycle has closed,” Mitsotakis said in a televised address, adding that Greece would “proudly raise its head again” on his watch.

“I will not fail to honour your hopes,” he said as early congratulation calls came from outgoing European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Early results from nearly 80 percent of polling stations showed New Democracy scoring a crushing victory by nearly 40 percent — its best score in over a decade — to over 31 percent for Tsipras’s leftist Syriza party.

“I want to see this people prosper. I want to see the children who left to return,” he later told party supporters.

Mitsotakis will be sworn in as Greece’s new prime minister on Monday.

Tsipras had earlier admitted defeat after over four years in power that saw Greece emerge from its third bailout.

The 44-year-old warned that his Syriza party would “dynamically” resist efforts to scale back the party’s pro-labour reforms.

If the results are confirmed, the 51-year-old Harvard graduate and former McKinsey consultant Mitsotakis will have a majority of 158 lawmakers in the 300-seat parliament. Tsipras’s party will have 86 seats.

The final number will depend on how smaller parties fare. They need at least 3.0 percent of the vote to enter parliament.

New Democracy was last in power in 2014, in coalition with the Greek socialists.

Mitsotakis is a scion of one of Greece’s top political families.

He is the son of former prime minister Constantine Mitsotakis, one of the country’s longest-serving parliamentarians.

His sister is former minister Dora Bakoyannis, Athens’s first female mayor. And new Athens mayor Costas Bakoyannis, elected in May, is his nephew.