In his election victory Kyriakou Mitsotakis and in his political line as a positive example for the European forces of the center-right, Claudio Cerraza refers today in his opinion article, director of the Italian newspaper Il Foglioof liberal orientation.

In more detail, in his opinion article published on the front page of Il Foglio, Cerazza underlines:

“Will we end up like Greece? Let’s hope. In the great mobility of the European right, a right that is in search of a new profile, a new history, a new identity and an accepted presence, there is a name that the so-called Conservatives in Italy have chosen to remove from their vocabulary. This name is hard to pronounce, indeed. But the reason for choosing this Italian right wing is a more subtle matter than the difficult pronunciation of the name.

To refer to the triumph of the right in Greece (which won 158 seats out of a total of 300), would mean admitting the existence of an impressively successful model, but which is at the opposite end of the populist doctrine fueled by Italy’s conservatives in recent years .

For a long time, the Italian right indicated to its voters the obligatory path of the fight against globalization, austerity and markets, with the aim of increasing the welfare of the citizens. And for this reason it chose to identify as its earthly prophet the president of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, who in his country effectively represented the demands of a kind of right determined to express a politics of introversion.

But Mitsotakis’s victory in Greece offers the European right a clear alternative to the Orban model, and this alternative should be evaluated carefully for two reasons:

The first is what Mitsotakis did in the last four years during his administration in the field of the economy. If one has the patience to cross-check the numbers of the national reform plans sent at the end of April by the Italian and Greek governments to the European Commission, they will discover something interesting.

First: within four years, Greece’s public debt will be smaller than Italy’s. It will be of the order of 135.2% of GDP compared to 140.4% of the Italian one, (in 2020 Greek debt reached 206.3% of GDP) while Greece’s growth rate will be twice that of Italy. The April forecasts say that Greece’s GDP will show an increase of 2.3% in the year 2023, 3% in 2024, 1.3% in the year 2025 and 1.1% in 2026. In April, in parallel, the forecasts of of the Italian government referred to a growth of 0.9% for 2023 (but according to the official statistical institute of the country it will be at least 1.2%) of 1.4% in the year 2024, 1.3% in 2025 and of the order of 1 .1% in 2026.

The same applies to primary surplus. This year Greece predicts that it will record more income than expenditure (with a projected primary surplus of 1.1% for 2023) while Italy, this year predicts that it will have a deficit of 0.8%.

The second reason why the Italian right should carefully study the Mitsotakis model is the one mentioned a few days ago by the Wall Street Journal. It is about the adoption of a method diametrically opposed to that of Orbán. Mitsotakis first cleaned up Greece and then won the election by promising a seven-point cut in the corporate tax rate, heralding pension reform with an approach that does not want to cause a fiscal problem and citing a key element of improving citizens’ welfare of: betting, that is, not on anti-market populism, but on the benefits of a proper mix of disciplined fiscal policy and confidence in globalization.

On the Italian right, the model of the Greek right is perplexing because it presents a successful alternative to the model of the populist right and because it indicates the part of the road that must be traveled to move decisively from the period of conspiracy to that of pragmatism .

Fewer words, more Mitsotakis. Will we end up like Greece? I wish”.