of absence, infirmity, or advanced old age). Nowadays the civic duty of voting is still considered "mandatory" but there are no sanctions for failing to vote. Turnout at national elections is low: a mere 56.6% at the 2015 election and 57.9% at the 2019 election. Political culture Before 1910, Greece lacked a coherent party system in accordance with the traits of the modern representative democracy. The political formations of the 19th century lacked a steady organizational structure and a clear ideological orientation. Sometimes, they constituted just the incoherent and ephemeral escort of a prominent politician. The first Greek parties with an ideological background, conforming to the modern conception of a political party, appeared after 1910, when Eleftherios Venizelos rose to predominance in Greek political life and founded his Liberal Party. The liberal wave of Venizelism resulted soon in the reaction of the "old-system" political leaders, who formed the core of an opposing conservative movement, which used the monarchy as its main rallying banner. Thereby, the two biggest ideological movements, the republican centrist-liberal and the monarchist conservative, emerged and formed massive political organizations. The centrist and the conservative parties bitterly confronted each other in the ensuing legislative elections for many decades, until metapolitefsi. After the metapolitefsi of 1974, the leftist-socialist movement supplanted the centrists and took the main part of their electorate. A smaller part of erstwhile centrists, along with most conservatives, affiliated themselves with the centre-right New Democracy party, which self-defined as a liberal party and drafted the republican Constitution of 1975. Until recently, Greece has had a two-party system dominated by the liberal-conservative New Democracy (ND) and the center-left Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK). Other parties won far fewer seats. Beginning in the May and June 2012 legislative elections, SYRIZA (the Coalition of the Radical Left) overtook PASOK as the main force of the left wing. After almost three years of opposition to the ND-PASOK coalition government, SYRIZA took the most votes in the January 2015 elections and formed government, while PASOK just barely crossed the threshold. Currently, the left is represented in Parliament by the Communist Party of Greece (KKE), SYRIZA, KINAL and MeRA25.To the right of ND, lies Kyriakos Velopoulos' Greek Solution. 2019 election Election of the President of the Republic The head of state – the President of the Hellenic Republic – is elected by Parliament for a five-year term, and a maximum of two terms in