Judge Elected Greek President in Narrow Vote

Parliament today elected Christos Sartzetakis, a supreme court judge backed by Premier Andreas Papandreou’s Socialists, as Greece’s new president with 180 votes, the bare minimum required.

Opposition conservatives immediately claimed the election was invalid.

The 180 votes received by Sartzetakis, 56, in the 300-seat Parliament was the minimum he needed in the third and final ballot to win a five-year term in office.

There were 298 deputies present. Five ballot papers were spoiled and one was blank.

In all, 112 deputies who were present abstained from the vote, including all those from the main opposition New Democracy Party.

New Democracy held that the election was illegal because parliamentary speaker Yiannis Alevras, Socialist deputy serving as acting president, had taken part in the balloting.

“We don’t consider that a president has been elected,” New Democracy leader Constantine Mitsotakis said.

Sartzetakis made no immediate comment on his election. He is due to be sworn in as president on Saturday.

The constitution specifies that if Parliament fails to elect a president after three votes, Parliament must be dissolved and a new general election must be held.

Sartzetakis, who belongs to no political party, replaces 78-year-old Constantine Caramanlis, a conservative, pro-Western statesman the Socialists unexpectedly dropped as a consensus candidate.

Caramanlis was widely viewed as acting as a restraint on Papandreou, who has pledged radical domestic and social changes at home and who has spoken against extending the leases for four U.S. bases in Greece.