“It is contempt for the rest of the parties to discuss a debate between the first two. The election result canceled it. We will do with everyone’s participation. The experiment of the previous debate was successful”, said Kyriakos Mitsotakis speaking to ERT.

Watch live the interview of Mr. Mitsotakis:

The president of the National Democratic Party answered the following regarding the Greek-Turkish: “Today, Turkey has a strong and stable government, while Greece has an official government. If the elections had been held with enhanced proportionality, we would also have a strong government. Indeed, there has been an improvement in Greek-Turkish relations in recent months. I take that as a positive. I would like a meeting with Mr Erdogan to redefine the road map on which we will move in the coming months. If I am prime minister at the NATO summit I will pursue it. I want to make it clear that the rapprochement between Greece and Turkey goes through a comprehensive consideration of Turkey’s relationship with the West. We have followed a coherent foreign policy. At the same time, we insisted on the need for a fair immigration policy. Greece recognizes only one dispute for which it could go to The Hague, the delimitation of maritime zones. Greece does not discuss issues of militarization of the islands or sovereignty. Turkey should return to the policy of previous years. Only in recent years has Turkey started to add issues that no Greek prime minister would be willing to discuss.”

Regarding equipment, Mr. Mitsotakis said: “Greece has an obligation to strengthen its armed forces because we have a larger and geopolitically unpredictable neighbor next to us. We have managed to change the balance in terms of the strength of the armed forces. In the air, things have changed completely compared to 4 years ago. Right now Turkey is ruled out to get f35 and we have approval to get them. Turkey is trying to upgrade f16 and we have Rafale”.

Regarding what he said about the intervention of the Turkish consulate in favor of SYRIZA candidates in Rodopi and Xanthi, he said that it is up to Mr. Tsipras if he wants to keep them on his ballot papers. “The issue is not whether the Rhodope is pink or blue, but it is a major issue to know that the Turkish consulate supports the candidates, that Mr. Tsipras knows it and keeps them. We are talking about a shared secret.”

Referring to the economy, Mr. Mitsotakis said that the ND program included the reduction of VAT, but as a last priority and horizontally. “We said in 2019 that we wanted to reach the level of making permanent reductions in VAT. We didn’t make it. It is our only commitment that we did not fulfill”, he emphasized. He added that “we put it down and saw that a possible reduction in VAT would be a hole in the water”.