Greek opposition leader Yanis Varoufakis slammed Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis following his speech in the European Parliament on the seventh anniversary of the Greek referendum on Tuesday (5 July) that saw citizens vote overwhelmingly against EU imposed austerity measures.
In his speech, the Greek prime minister said that “2022 Greece has nothing to do with 2015” and that his government is bringing Greece into a “new era”.
Mitsotakis’s participation in the plenary debate follows a recent decision of the European Parliament to invite to each plenary session a member state’s prime minister to debate the current situation of the EU and their country’s priorities.
Most of the recent debates have focused on the war in Ukraine and the energy crisis.
Instead, Mitsotakis also spoke of “growth, reducing unemployment, increasing investments” and the country being “liberated from the regime of enhanced supervision”.
However, Yanis Varoufakis, a finance minister in Alexis Tsipras’s Syriza government at the height of Greece’s bailout crisis, and now leader of the opposition party Mera25 told EURACTIV that Mitsotakis represented “the oligarchy running Europe” that is “determined to keep European democracy down and out”.
Referring to the period around the 2015 referendum, Varoufakis said that “European democracy was given a chance to breathe again when a European people – the Greeks – stood up and said no to the misanthropic, anti-European troika and its latest austerity program.”
Varoufakis, having led the campaign against the plan alongside Tsipras, described the ‘No’ vote as a great moment for European democracy. He accused Mitsotakis of denigrating this “magnificent moment”.
But Varoufakis was not the only one to criticise Mitsotakis. During the speech, some MEPs called the Greek prime minister out on domestic issues such as declining press freedom and the rule of law.
Mitsotakis was quick to reject them, saying that press freedom is guaranteed in Greece, and NGOs rankings are unreliable. He even held up copies of Greek dailies in an attempt to illustrate his point.
In the 2022 World Press Freedom Index by Reporters Without Borders, Greece plunged to 108, the lowest ranking in the EU.
A source of the organisation told EURACTIV that press freedom problems in the country are comparable to those that are facing Hungarian independent media.
Background
Greece’s economic crisis, which left the country on the brink of default, saw the country forced into a series of EU and IMF bailout programmes totalling €400 billion, in return for harsh spending cuts and tax rises. In July 2015, more than 60% of Greek citizens voted against the bailout terms in a referendum called by the Tsipras government, prompting fears that the country could be forced to leave the eurozone. In the weeks that followed a revised bailout deal was agreed by Greece and its creditors.
[Edited by Benjamin Fox]
Source: euractiv.com
