By Penelope Galliou

With the hourglass for setting up the ballot box emptying more and more, ND officials and MPs are now feverishly preparing for the upcoming elections with a horizon of April and a preferred date of April 9, although the prime minister has not yet revealed if that is the specific date which he has noted in his diary.

Piraeus is already preparing its candidates for the pre-election campaign, with the information stating that the first seminar for the candidate parliamentarians has already taken place both for their presence in the media and for the communication of the government work they will propose and highlight during the their activity in their constituencies, focusing on regional and local projects that concern local communities.

Emphasis is expected to be placed – as government officials and the prime minister himself are already doing throughout the long informal pre-election period the country is going through – on the government’s positive agenda and social policy, as reflected in the policies in the field of health, education, the strengthening of young people through the housing programs but also the financial support of society in the successive crises that the country was called upon to face during the government of the ND.

After all, this is what the prime minister is expected to do – according to government sources – even more emphatically during his tours, which will intensify in the coming period, but also in every public statement and presence, stressing that his and his government’s commitments have been put into practice rather than the difficulties faced by the country, remaining consistent in his declarations.

At the same time, Mr Kyriakos Mitsotakis it is expected to give the stamp of the government’s planning for the next four years, as long as the citizens trust it again for another four years, continuing in the logic that it will proceed with all those policies that will push the country forward and continue to support the citizens , but always without jeopardizing fiscal stability. “Measured and costed” as government sources emphasize.

In this context, at the end of the month, it is expected to be announced during the Council of Ministers on February 28th, and the increase in the minimum wage that will take effect from April 1st and which will most likely be the last positive announcement that will be voted before the dissolution of the Parliament for the elections.

However, before the elections, perhaps one more Council of Ministers is expected at the beginning of March, which will have a reporting nature and will be the opening “fire” of the official pre-election period, with the corresponding declaration announcing the elections by the Prime Minister himself.

By then, the ND ballot papers will have been finalized and are ready almost in their entirety, with some last names “awaiting” the Prime Minister’s approval. The same applies to the State ballot, which is handled by Kyriakos Mitsotakis himself and he is said to have decided that in the six electable positions he will choose three women and three men for reasons of political symbolism as he believes that women are underrepresented in the Parliament.

At the moment, the only name that sounds like a given in the elected positions is that of the Deputy Minister of Finance Theodoros Skylakakis, while it is not excluded that a name from the field of sports as well as a representative of the diaspora may be included.