Greek pro-bailout parties to win majority, says poll

Greece's two major parties, which are backing the country's EU/IMF bailout, would win a narrow parliamentary majority if elections were held today, a poll showed on Wednesday, less than three weeks before a May 6 general election.
The conservative New Democracy party and the Socialist PASOK party, would win between them 158 of the country's 300 parliamentary seats, according to a survey by pollster Marc published in newspaper Ethnos.
New Democracy would win 110 seats and PASOK 48 seats, according to the poll.
Support for the conservative New Democracy party was at 22.3%, down 2.5 percentage points from a previous poll by Marc last month. The Socialist PASOK party was down 0.6 points to 17.8%.
Based on those poll numbers, the election would allow the two parties to renew their coalition government, which started work in November under outgoing technocrat Prime Minister Lucas Papademos.
The Democratic Alliance, a small centre-right party whose Chairwoman Dora Bakoyanni also backed the bailout but did not take part in the Papademos government, would win eight seats with 3% of the vote.
The prospect of an unclear election result has caused concern among the country's international lenders, which want Greece's future government to stick to the austerity policies that underpin its 130-bln-euro bailout. Failure to implement them will put the country's membership of the euro at risk.
Apart from PASOK, New Democracy and the Democratic Alliance, seven anti-bailout parties would cross a 3% threshold to make it into the new parliament, the poll showed.
They include the extreme right Golden Dawn party, which would win 15 seats with 5.7% of the vote, up from 3.2% in the previous Marc poll.
After almost two years of austerity, Greece is going through its worst post-World War Two recession, with record unemployment and painful cuts in pensions and salaries.