The Greek government is sharply escalating its criticism against SYRIZA and personally against Alexis Tsipras. While government officials won’t publicly admit it, it’s an open secret that the ruling party views Tsipras as its preferred opponent heading into the next elections. The “Mitsotakis vs. Tsipras” dynamic — the question of who will lead the country — is widely seen as a rivalry that clearly favors the current prime minister.
Read also: Tsipras attacks Mitsotakis over the criminal code: “Speak now with names and addresses — enough with the mud-slinging”
Mitsotakis fires back with sharp criticism
Speaking on Alpha Radio yesterday morning, Kyriakos Mitsotakis chose to pick up the gauntlet thrown by Tsipras — who had called him the “high priest of corruption” — and engage in direct confrontation. “What I can tell you about Mr. Tsipras is that he had absolutely no interest in dealing with these cases. Quite the opposite. The first thing he did in 2015 was vote for the ‘Paraskevopoulos law’ and release the most serious criminals from prison. And the last thing he did was keep Parliament in session for a week after the 2019 European elections — after he had already announced he would call snap elections — to do what? To change the criminal code,” Mitsotakis said, sharply intensifying his criticism of Tsipras. He then pushed the attack even further: “At some point, Mr. Tsipras owes the public an answer: why did he keep Parliament open? What favors did he cash in with that decision?”
Pierrakakis: “Tsipras is the godfather of the funds”
Shortly afterward, Minister of National Economy and Finance Kyriakos Pierrakakis, speaking before the Parliament’s Standing Committee on Economic Affairs during a debate on private debt legislation, launched his own offensive against the SYRIZA leader. “During the Tsipras government — and I will cite the actual laws — it wasn’t just the legislation on funds that was passed; loans worth hundreds of millions of euros had already been transferred. The very system that some are denouncing today was put in place under their own government,” Pierrakakis said. He then escalated his rhetoric further, stating pointedly: “To put it in one phrase, Alexis Tsipras — to use left-wing terminology — is the great ‘godfather’ of the funds in Greece. That is your legislative legacy.”
Mitsotakis returned to this line of attack later in the afternoon, in a speech delivered at an event marking the second anniversary of the Organized Crime Combating Directorate, held at the Athens Concert Hall. “We lived through times when other laws, passed by other governments, released prisoners en masse. We lived through times when, just before elections were called, criminal codes were revised in favor of defendants. None of this can be hidden behind any rebranding or naive commentary that vaguely implies crime didn’t exist in the past and we all lived in some kind of angelic society. The opposite is true,” he said, in a pointed rebuke of the Tsipras era.
Government spokesperson Marinakis responds — and raises the stakes on the criminal code
When the SYRIZA leader subsequently accused the prime minister of trying to spread “mud and insinuations” against him and called on him to present concrete evidence for his claims, government spokesperson Pavlos Marinakis responded within hours. He accused Tsipras of keeping “Parliament in session in June 2019 and tabling the criminal code bill, which his remaining MPs rushed to pass on June 6, 2019 — just four days before he called elections on June 10 of that same year.” Marinakis also recalled statements made by former Justice Minister (2016–2018) Stavros Kontonis, who — as Marinakis noted — had declared beyond his remarks about the alleged operation of shadow justice ministries within the then-Maximos Mansion: “The manner in which the new criminal code was engineered and passed represents an extreme instance of collusion between the former SYRIZA government and the oligarchy.”
