Greece’s Parliament was officially dissolved on Tuesday evening as the country is about to vote in snap polls set for July 7 after Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’s ruling left-wing party SYRIZA lost the 2019 EU elections at the end of May.

The Greek Parliament was dissolved with a decree of President Prokopis Pavlopoulos placed outside the main entrance of the parliament building in Athens, The Greek Reporter reported.

Tsipras’s ruling party SYRIZA won only 23.8% of the votes in the European Parliament elections on May 26, translating into six MEP seats in the EU legislature, same as back in 2014.

The opposition right-wing New Democracy Party, however, won over 33% of the votes cast in the 2019 EU elections, and a total of eight seats in the European Parliament.

Even though SYRIZA retained its number of MEPs, its loss has often been described by commentators as “devastating”.

On Monday, Prime Minister Tsipras visited Greek President Pavlopoulos to ask him to officially dissolve the Parliament ahead of the snap polls, doing justice to a long-standing Greek political tradition.

National security or the state of the economy are usually cited as arguments by the respective Prime Minister who asks the President to set a date for early elections.

Because of the results of the European elections in Greece, the country had entered a long “pre-election phase”, Tsipras told reporters in Athens.

In his words, that could “put the Greek economy in danger”, which was the formal reason he asked the President to dissolve the Parliament.

President Pavlopoulos formally accepted the Prime Minister’s request and issued a presidential decree dissolving the 300-seat Greek Parliament late on Tuesday.

The early elections in Greece on July 7, 2019, will be the first national election in the country’s history in which the voting age will be lowered from 18 to 17.

(Photo: Alexis Tsipras on Twitter)