[ad_1]
Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis is accused of illegally pushing asylum seekers back to sea. He has admitted that the country’s intelligence service is targeting opposition leaders. They have consolidated media control as press freedom in Greece has fallen to the lowest in Europe.
This is something that the EU’s guardians under right-wing populist leadership, whether Italy’s Giorgia Meloni or Hungary’s Viktor Orban, often downplay. But with Greece holding national elections on Sunday, Brussels instead praised Mr Mitsotakis, a pro-European conservative, for bringing economic stability to Greece, for sending military aid to Ukraine and providing regional stability at a time of potential upheaval in Turkey. .
Above all, EU leaders appeared to be cutting Mr Mitsotakis down for doing a dismal job on the continent to keep migrants at bay, a development that shows how Europe has changed, with hard-line measures once associated with the right wing drifting into the mainstream.
“I am helping Europe on many fronts,” Mr Mitsotakis said in a brief interview on Tuesday in the port city of Piraeus, where, dressed in his trademark blue shirt and tights, the 55-year-old rallied adoring voters. the streets. “It buys us enough goodwill.”
With Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, calling Greece’s border enforcement a “shield” of Europe, Mr Mitsotakis said that after the arrival of more than a million migrants and asylum-seekers had disrupted the continent’s politics by entering through Greece during the refugee crisis. 2015 and 2016, Europe has taken a tougher approach to Greece.
“We have managed to change, I think, the European approach vis-à-vis migration,” said Mr Mitsotakis, a self-described progressive, rejecting the idea that the policy – which critics say includes pushing for illegal asylum. people looking back – there hard-right.
“Right wing or center policy,” said Mr. Mitsotakis, leader of the nominally center-right New Democracy party, “I don’t know what it is, but I have to protect my borders.”
In turn, Europe appears to have protected Mr. Mitsotakis.
“It’s the Mitsotakis exception,” said Alberto Alemanno, professor of European Union law at the HEC Paris business school. Mr Mitsotakis’ special treatment comes from his political closeness to Ms von der Leyen, Alemanno said, and his willingness to build – with funds from the bloc – a vast network of migrant centers that have proven politically popular in Greece.
Mr Mitsotakis insisted that some of the “leftist Illuminati in Brussels” failed to see that he was saving lives with his policies, which European leaders said he did.
“We’re not like the poster child for problems in Europe,” he said, adding that what he’s doing “offers relief to a lot of people.”
Greece included. Ahead of Sunday’s election, Mr Mitsotakis was leading comfortably in opinion polls against his main rival, Alexis Tsipras, of the left-wing Syriza party, although the prime minister still appears to lack the support to win outright. A second round of elections looks likely in July.
In the neighborhood where Mr. Mitsotakis campaigned, people talked about how he had made the original Greek island that was once overrun with migrants livable again, how he had become the first Greek prime minister invited to speak at a joint session of Congress in Washington, and how he had stood up for Turkey’s powerful president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who himself faces an election runoff next week.
Greeks throughout the country appreciate how Mr. Mitsotakis has cut taxes and debt and increased digitization, minimum wages and pensions.
For a decade, Greece became a migraine in Europe. The sovereign debt crisis of 2010 almost destroyed the European Union. Humiliating bailouts followed, and a decade of stark austerity policies – led by Germany – cut pensions and public services, shrinking economic output by a quarter, inflated unemployment and prompted thousands of young and professional Greeks to flee.
In 2015, under the leadership of Mr. Tsipras, the Greeks voted to reject a multi-string European aid package, and the country was almost kicked out of the eurozone. Social unrest and talk of “Grexit” mounted, but Mr. Tsipras ended up implementing the necessary reforms and moderated in the following years, arguing that Greece had started on the road to recovery.
But in 2019 he lost to Mr. Mitsotakis – the son of a former prime minister, trained at Harvard and Stanford, easily in Washington – who is seen as the personification of the establishment. He promised to attack the Greek ships.
“That’s always my bet,” Mr. Mitsotakis said. “And I think we’ve delivered.”
His government has accelerated growth to twice the euro zone average. Large multinational companies and start-ups have invested. Tourism is skyrocketing.
The country is repaying creditors ahead of schedule, and Mr Mitsotakis expects, if he wins, the international rating agency to lift Greek bonds from junk status. The number of migrant arrivals has fallen by 90 percent since the crisis in 2015, but also significantly since Mr. Mitsotakis took office four years ago.
“European success story,” The Economist called Greece in Mr. Mitsotakis.
But he said he would need another four years to complete the project. Greece, which still has the highest national debt in the European Union, is also the second poorest country in the bloc, after Bulgaria. Tax evasion is still common, and the country’s judicial system is so slow that it scares off investors.
Mr Mitsotakis’ critics say that, beyond the economy, he represents a danger to Greece’s values, and that Europe is turning a blind eye to its focus on finances and the falling number of migrants.
Humanitarian groups have accused Mr Mitsotakis of illegally pushing migrants over land and sea. He barely ran away from the problem, recently visiting Lesbos, the Greek island that has become synonymous with the despicable conditions at the Moria camp, which was packed with 20,000 refugees before it burned down.
“Moria is no more,” Mr. Mitsotakis said in the interview. “It just doesn’t exist. I mean, you have olive groves and we have ultramodern reception facilities built with European money. Critics have denounced prison-like conditions in the new camps, but Greeks support a hard line.
Europe “lacks above Greece to do pushbacks and all that sort of thing,” said Camino Mortera-Martinez, who heads the Brussels office for the Center for European Reform, a think tank.
The latitude Greece has been given, he says, is a recognition that the country has survived decades of brutal austerity. But it also described that Europe as a whole “can’t help” Greece and other countries on the front lines of the migration crisis, allowing “these governments to do what they do.”
Apart from migration, there are other more pressing issues at home. In February, a train crash killed 57 people, exposing Greece’s rickety infrastructure and the limits of Mr. Mitsotakis’ talk of modernization. Reporters Without Borders considers Greece the worst country in the European Union for press freedom in its 2023 index.
Over the summer, Mr Mitsotakis’ top intelligence official was caught recording journalists and politicians, including Nikos Androulakis, the leader of the Pasok opposition party and a member of the European Parliament. Mr. Mitsotakis denied, to the incredulity of many, knowing anything about it. Some of the people the intelligence service spoke to were also found to have illegal malware on their devices. The government refused to put it there.
But Mr Mitsotakis, in a televised debate this month, conceded that Mr Androulakis should not have been tapped. The espionage was a bad idea, as Mr. Androulakis’ support could be crucial to the final outcome of the election.
But the scandal is low on voters’ priority lists, as is Mr Mitsotakis’ treatment of migrants.
John Vrakas, 66, who handed out pamphlets to Mr Tsipras across the square from where Mr Mitsotakis was to speak, shrugged that Europe was not bothered if the prime minister let go of his concerns about the economy and Ukraine. . “It’s a trade-off,” he said.
This is one thing Greek voters like to do.
As Mr. Mitsotakis walks down the street, a bus driver leans out the window and grabs his hand. “Supporters until the end,” shouted a group of people in front of the cafe. “I believe in you,” shouted the woman from the jewelry store.
What “resonates in Europe,” Mr. Mitsotakis said, is an “anti-populist government” that has brought much-appreciated stability back to Greece in a violent region.
He woke up from an interview in a small and otherwise empty restaurant, and shook more hands on the way to the square, where he launched into a short speech interrupted by church bells.
“I’m not sure who it’s for,” Mr. Mitsotakis said, “but it’s not for us.”
Niki Kitsantonis contributed reports from Athens.
[ad_2]
Source link