ATHENS — When he called elections six months ahead of schedule, Greek Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis was ahead in the polls, had scored important economic success and probably expected an easy victory.
Then came Greece's most devastating fire season on record. A week of relentless blazes charred more than half a million acres of farmland and villages, killed at least 64 people and now threatens to upend national politics.
With harried firefighters from a dozen nations finally getting an upper hand on most of the wildfires, officials are assessing the political and economic fallout from the disaster.
The government estimates damages at more than $1.6 billion, about 0.6% of the country's gross domestic product, but says it will have access to as much as $800 million in emergency funds from the European Union. Greek news media put the total much higher.
The important olive oil industry will be badly hurt, officials say. In just one heavily hit area, Ilia, about 4 million olive trees were burned.
Overall, though, the government says, the fire-ravaged stretches of the Peloponnese peninsula in southern Greece account for only about 12% of agricultural output.
Tourism, Greece's top money-earner after shipping, may suffer if travelers eschew the once-lush forested beach areas of Peloponnesus. Tour operators say they hope travelers will reroute to unscathed parts of the country, such as Athens and most of the islands.
Much of the damage will be political.
Final polls before the Sept. 16 vote, published Friday, give a narrow lead to Karamanlis' New Democracy Party.
But they also show that both New Democracy and the main opposition party, the Socialists, who ruled for all but three years from 1981 until 2004, have lost ground because of public anger over the fires, government handling of the crisis and the years of neglect and corruption that made Greece such a tinderbox.
As a result, smaller parties will tend to benefit, analysts say, and their advances will eat away at any majority gained by the winner of the election. In Greece's parliamentary system, that means it will be more difficult for the winning party to govern.
"In that scenario, just one member of parliament can have enormous power over the prime minister," said Anthony Livanios, head of Alphametrics, a research agency that does polling for New Democracy.
