PM Mitsotakis: ‘Greece keeps the door shut to provocations, but the window open to rapprochements’

Greece’s “drastic modernization seems to have disturbed many, and the country’s collective dynamics have deprived private interests of their power,” said Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis while addressing the New Democracy party’s political committee meeting on Monday.

These private interests “were once influencing the country’s trajectory extra-institutionally,” he added, while “these ‘centers’ would very much like to see a pressured prime minister and a weighed-down, anchored government,” he pointed out.

New Democracy “and I personally are an obstacle in the plans of a few ‘powerful’ ones, so to speak, but only a few,” and “I hereby state that we will not accept any kind of undermining, [as there is] no holding back on the changes we have committed ourselves to.”

As the country’s top political party, he said, “we are called to ensure that Greece will stay on the course of progress, as was decided in the 2019 national elections.”

“[Türkiye’s President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan does not try to hide the fact that he would like [SYRIZA-Progressive Alliance leader Alexis] Tsipras opposite him. But he has me (…), because this is what the sovereign Greek people chose and no one else. But I address Mr. Erdogan in all sincerity when I tell him that Greece keeps the door shut to provocations, but the window open to rapprochements,” he underlined.

Continuing, he said he knows “that geography wants us next to each other. I will say it again, I am a friend of the Turkish people, I express my disgust for Sunday’s terrorist attack in Istanbul, but we are not -and I am not- being led into a dialogue with the absurd,” he noted.

On domestic politics, he said that “our political oppenents learned nothing from the Novartis scandal,” he pointed out, as “there is no other route to take in a democracy but the one of the judicial system. We have nothing to fear,” he said, and referring to the recent wiretapping issue he added that “we were honest from the start, when we said that in the case of the tracking of [PASOK-KINAL leader] Nikos Androulakis an operational failure was indeed identified, as were the relevant responsibilities.”

Mitsotakis then said that he was “the first to take them [responsibilities] up and talk about them, and we immediately proceeded to raising control filters on legal intrusions, the judiciary and parliament were also activated on the issue, as all these are initiatives that the chairman of the PEGA committee recognized when in Athens, and had meaningful discussions with many state officials,” he said.

Over the next few days, said the prime minister, a modernized legal framework for the operation of Greece’s National Intelligence Service (EYP) will be released for public consultation, as will a framework for the security of communications,” he highlighted, “one that makes Greece the first country to explicitly prohibit the marketing, use and distribution of malicious software.”

APE