Greece heads to the polls tomorrow in a high-stakes election marked by voter anger at two years of austerity cuts, with analysts warning the outcome could be political stalemate and economic chaos.

Nearly 10 million people are registered to vote for a new government that must hit the ground running, with key reforms pledged to European and IMF creditors still incomplete and a debt repayment looming on May 15.

“Greece’s strategic course will be determined in these elections, its future for the coming decades,” outgoing technocrat Prime Minister Lucas Papademos warned at his government’s final Cabinet meeting on Wednesday.

The odds on the formation of a stable government are not promising.

The conservative New Democracy party, which leads opinion polls, has so far refused to entertain the idea of working with its sworn rivals, the Pasok socialists, to continue Greece’s fragile economic recovery.

At a party rally in Athens on Thursday, New Democracy leader Antonis Samaras said his party aimed to win enough votes to be able to govern alone with a “strong mandate”.

But New Democracy and Pasok, which have run the country between them since 1974, will be lucky to pool 50 per cent of the vote come tomorrow, down from 80 per cent in the years before the crisis, analysts say.

Greek voters were denied a referendum earlier in the year on an unpopular EU-IMF rescue plan deemed to have plunged the country into a deepening recession.

Many of them now appear determined to punish the two mainstream parties.

Three of the smaller parties − the KKE Communists, the Syriza leftists and the nationalist Independent Greeks − are all expected to make major gains at the polls tomorrow.

All three want to throw out the EU-IMF recovery blueprint known as the “memorandum”.

And for the first time in nearly 40 years, a neo-Nazi party − Golden Dawn − is poised to enter Parliament on the back of immigration and crime fears.

Under electoral law, the party that comes first gains 50 extra seats in the 300-seat Parliament, but even this provision may not be enough to produce a majority government.