Campaigning in Greece’s October 4 2009 snap parliamentary election was winding up two days before voters issue their verdict on the contest between prime minister Costas Karamanlis and centre-left Pasok leader George Papandreou, whose Pasok party is seen in opinion polls as poised to take the largest share of votes.
 
Exit polls will emerge soon after voting ends, and will determine whether Papandreou has succeeded in his hopes of getting sufficient votes to govern, or whether the prospect of further elections will arise.
 
In the final days of campaigning, Karamanlis went on a whirligig of public rallies, television appearances and media interviews, pushing the message that he has had since calling the ahead-of-term elections, that his New Democracy government should be given a fresh mandate to deal with the country’s economic crisis.
 
He has also pushed foreign policy issues, notably a tough line on Turkey, because of the neighbouring country’s incursions into what Greece claims as its air space, and what Athens sees as Ankara’s ineffectual dealings with illegal immigrants making their way to continental Europe.
 
Karamanlis has sought to beat down the challenge by Papandreou by portraying his Pasok rival as offering no more than vague promises to benefit the domestic economy and Greeks suffering from the financial crisis, and painting these promises as unaffordable.
 
Papandreou has made a raft of promises to benefit the hard-hit, and responding to Karamanlis’s challenges to say where the money to pay for these undertakings will come from, said: "it will be found where they (New Democracy) gave it away, where they wasted it, where they did not dare to look for it and find it".
 
Papandreou, a former foreign minister, portrayed his party as once again being called on to save the country, to which Karamanlis has responded with highlighting episodes that he claimed were evidence of failures by the socialists in the past.
 
Pasok would cut the number of ministries, reform the tax system to substantially improve earnings, and bring in "big changes" including clean government, Papandreou said, tapping into the number of scandals that have hit the Karamanlis government in recent years.
 
In the June 2009 European Parliament elections, Pasok got more votes than New Democracy, and after Karamanlis called the snap parliamentary elections, saw its poll ratings climb.
 
The two major parties have ruled out a post-election "grand coalition" between them and it remains to be seen whether any of the other 21 parties contesting the election would be drawn into a coalition with one or the other.

Greece’s complex system of allocating seats in parliament means that it may not be clear immediately about the implications of the outcome from exit polls, unless a party really does achieve an obvious landslide. Should a new election be necessary, it would be held under a changed system that would give the party with the largest number of votes a bonus, facilitating it being able to form a government.