“The Ministry of the Interior is always ready to hold elections,” he said the Minister of the Interior, Makis Voridis while to a journalist’s question whether they will be held on Sunday, May 21, he answered: “I think the prime minister said May. On the 21st of the month he did not say so. You have the right to make assessments.”

The Minister of the Interior, answering questions on the sidelines of the inauguration of the Ombudsman’s office, which took place inside the TIF premises, emphasized that he he is optimistic about the election result: “Obviously you relate with the tragedy of Tempe which we have experienced. It is absolutely obvious that there is a polling cost because of this tragic incident but I think that cannot be overemphasized. It is a consequence which is simply captured in the measurements. If you want to talk about the path to the elections and the subject of the debate that will be brought into the sphere of public dialogue, obviously we will talk about a lot more things. We will talk about economic and immigration policy, about public order, about national sovereignty, about defense, about public administration. It will be a broader debate in order for the Greek people to decide what they will vote for and for each citizen to form his opinion. We will not condense the time of a government term to a specific point in time when this tragedy occurred.”

About the results of polls that see the light of day, Mr. Voridis said: “I mostly see a world that goes to I do not know I do not answer/ I have only decided somewhere else. I do not see tectonic, systemic changes, in the political system and in the general picture and in the mapping of the correlations, like for example the time when we really had tectonic political changes in the time of the consequences of the memorandum. There we had a huge rearrangement of the political scene. I don’t see that reflected in the polls, at least.”

For whether or not you should Kostas Ah. Karamanlis to be a parliamentary candidate in the upcoming elections in Serres, the minister pointed out: “The prime minister answered, he said he would discuss it with him. The prime minister has already spoken. In any case, there are two people who have to decide on this particular nomination. He himself if he is interested and the prime minister if he will propose him. They said they will discuss it, we will wait for the outcome of the discussion.”

Asked what would he do if he were in Mr. Karamanlis’ position, Mr. Voridis emphasized: “I consider that Mr. Karamanlis with his resignation assumed political objective responsibility but he also showed a unique integrity which we may consider self-evident, but we had not seen the self-evident done by others. We saw it done by this guy. How would I react? Like him: I would discuss with the prime minister.”