Greek prime minister Costas Karamanlis was scheduled to meet the country’s president Karolos Papoulias on September 3 2009 to ask the head of state to dissolve parliament and open the way for the snap elections Karamanlis announced the previous day.
 
Media and politicians in Greece have been speculating for months that Karamanlis - embattled because of the economic crisis, the violence that rocked Athens and other Greek cities, and corruption scandals, along with criticism over handling of recent wildfires - would be forced to seek a fresh mandate from Greek voters.
 
With the elections scheduled for October 4, Karamanlis and his New Democracy party will have only about a month to overcome the fact that they are said by opinion polls to be trailing the opposition socialist Pasok party led by George Papandreou.
 
At the most recent national elections, in September 2007, Karamanlis’s party achieved a crushing defeat of Papandreou’s Pasok, but since then the picture has changed. At the 2009 elections for members of the European Parliament, Greek voters gave Pasok 36.64 per cent and Karamanlis’s party 32.29 per cent.
 
Speaking on national television on September 2 2009, Karamanlis said that there was a need for immediate and far-reaching reforms not only to deal with the effects of the global economic crisis but also long-standing problems in Greece’s domestic economy and public sector.
 
He said that he was declaring "war" on tax evasion.
 
Had snap polls not been called, elections would have been due in 2011.
 
Karamanlis’s path to the polls is lonely, Greek newspaper Ta Nea said on September 3, as quoted by Bulgarian news agency Focus. Several Greek newspapers reacted with scepticism about Karamanlis’s chances of remaining in power.