The Greek Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, has undertaken a profound restructuring of his Government as a result of the poor electoral result in the European elections last Sunday. Although New Democracy won the elections, it obtained only 28% of the votes, far from the 40% it achieved a year ago in the general elections. Abstention was 58.61%, the highest recorded in Greece, where voting is mandatory, although there is no penalty for those who do not exercise it. The extreme right achieved a great result, despite the fact that its vote was divided between three candidates. Between the three of them they achieved 16.7% of the ballots. Greek Solution, the most ultranationalist, got 9.3%. The pro-Putin Niki formation reached 4.4%. And with 3%, a newly created, more radical party called The Voice of Reason (Foni Logikís) emerged, led by Afroditi Latinopoulou.
For the Ministry of Immigration and Asylum, one of the departments where the requests of the extreme right are most evident, Mitsotakis recovers Nikos Panagiotopoulos, a tough profile. Panagiotopoulos was defense minister in March 2020, when the largest crisis between Greece and Turkey of this century occurred, in which the borders were completely closed and the right to asylum was suspended for weeks. Takis Theodorikakos, responsible for Citizen Protection until a few months ago, will head the Ministry of Development, while the head of the Interior, Niki Kerameos, will take over Labor and thus hand over her portfolio to her current number two, Thodoris Livanios. .
For the Ministries of Economy and Energy, Mitsotakis is betting on the continuity of Kostis Hatzidakis and Theodoros Skylakakis, respectively, two liberal profiles who boast of being more pragmatic than ideological when deciding the direction in their departments.
Government sources affirm that the objective of the reorganization of the Executive is to meet the demands of citizens. “The voters have told us: ‘We trust you, but be better, move faster,” said government spokesman Pavlos Marinakis.
Fight between two sectors
In the background of this government crisis is the same doubt that runs through all the center-right parties in Europe. How do you stop the bleeding of votes towards far-right parties? In New Democracy the debate is between two poles. The most conservative wing believes that the turn towards the center that Mitsotakis is carrying out is too rapid, and that measures such as the approval of equal marriage leave too much free space for the parties to his right.
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The liberal sector, on the contrary, believes that the loss of electoral support is not due so much to ideological issues but to much more pressing, but mundane problems such as inflation, the tax burden, the intricate bureaucracy or the increasing difficulty of accessing a living place.
Sources close to Mitsotakis, who prefer not to be identified, explain that the names that make up the new Executive fulfill both functions. That is, they try to satisfy both sectors in the fray without explicitly opting for any of them. In other words, the priority is to contain inflation without giving up setting a more political profile.
Another important aspect to understand portfolio changes is the territorial issue. The north of the country is where New Democracy lost the most votes, in the regions where the primary sector is more significant. In the last year alone, farmers have suffered the consequences of the largest fires in Europe, the largest floods on record and the longest succession of heat waves since measurements have been made. Local organizations denounce that their demands have not been met. To try to redirect the relationship with farmers, Mitsotakis has chosen Konstantinos Tsiaras to head the Ministry of Agriculture. A native of Thessaly, where the floods occurred last September, Tsiaras held the Ministry of Justice until 2023 and is a veteran within the center-right.
The new Government will not have a single day of respite. Greece is experiencing extreme temperatures, in the center of the country it has reached 44.5° degrees, which is the earliest extreme heat wave ever recorded in the country. The end of the school year has been brought forward, a large part of the officials are teleworking and the hours of small businesses have been modified. And summer hasn’t even started yet.
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