“This is an unspeakable tragedy of enormous proportions. One of the biggest that has happened in the Mediterranean. The competent Minister of the interim Government must say what exactly our country did to prevent this tragedy, so that there are no shadows and publications in the international press, which create questions. We have been hearing various things since the morning, it would be good if these things were clarified” said the President of PASOK-Movement for Change, Nikos Androulakis, regarding the fatal wreck in an interview with journalist Nikos Hatzinikolaou, on REAL FM.

Mr. Androulakis regarding the immigrant-refugee issue: added “Europe is at the “head” of Africa and the end of Asia. It is very easy to cross its borders. My approach is that the fence on the Evros prevents Turkey’s strategy of instrumentalizing the refugee at the level of hybrid warfare. Refugee-immigration will escalate in the coming decades either due to climate change or due to war situations and powerful terrorist organizations. We need to create islands of state security within Africa. Rwanda, for example, after the Genocide of 1994, the largest since World War II, stabilized economically and in recent years, while its size is the size of the Peloponnese, it has welcomed about 2.5 million immigrants from neighboring countries. As long as there are no states that can welcome neighboring populations from war zones, these people will enter into great adventures. Consider a man who starts from his village in Nigeria and has to cross the Sahara. How many of them are lost in the desert before falling into the hands of slavers?’

Regarding the revision of the “Dublin III” Regulation, Mr. Androulakis underlined: “The day before yesterday, I heard the government celebrating the plan submitted by the Council of Ministers. To me, they celebrate poorly. A few steps are taken. The figures speak of a solidarity mechanism of 30,000 relocations within European states, when asylum applications submitted in 2022 across the EU were 960,000. What are we talking about now? Mr. Mitarakis must tell us why he is celebrating. Mr. Mitsotakis did not raise institutional issues, because he knew very well that the European right-wing is against moving forward with extensive solidarity mechanisms in the Dublin revision. We, as socialists, said something simple: There should be permanent relocation based on population, unemployment, economic situation, so that the member states contribute to the host countries”.

“If you look at the data, the ships are leaving from countries in North Africa where there is instability. Some are profiting by sacrificing the lives of these people. When you have children and women locked in the holds of these rotten boats, you are a criminal and a murderer,” said Mr. Androulakis.

Regarding the political current affairs, the President of PASOK-Movement of Change pointed out: “There is an election result, which showed that the opposition of Mr. Tsipras was a “golden” sponsor of Mr. Mitsotakis. I appeal to the progressive leftists: Do not remain hostage to Mr. Tsipras’s leadership team. I don’t know anyone on the real left who is happy that on the Thursday before the last national elections, Mr. Tsipras revealed why he did not vote for the amendment that banned Golden Dawn, the killers of Fyssa, from participating in the elections. He invited them to vote for SYRIZA as allegedly deviant, while they have been murdered and are in prison as a criminal organization. What real leftist is proud of these micro-politics games of Mr. Tsipras?”

“New Democracy is helped by a pre-election period, where no discussion is raised, because it has to answer difficult questions. For example, she cannot promise in her pre-election spot a 25% increase in the average salary and have filed a month before mid-term where she talks about a 13% increase. I have never seen such mockery of the Greek people. He cannot claim that health is going well and he funded it. I have said before that we are third in private health spending, behind Bulgaria and Lithuania. The MPs of New Democracy countered that the situation has improved. But the day before yesterday I went back to the data, and we are now second,” Mr. Androulakis emphasized.

“We had a government that increased inequality. It undermined the welfare state in a critical phase such as the pandemic. Public school is going from bad to worse. The country’s finances are in dire straits, because we passed memoranda and said we “put the problems behind us”, but we have 50 billion new debt in four years from Mr. Mitsotakis on our backs and the next generations. The external deficit is the largest since 2010, that is, after what happened, again under New Democracy we have a record external deficit. 12% last year and 9% this year. And if the executives of New Democracy tell you that this happened because of a pandemic in Europe, I answer them: Portugal had a 1% deficit last year, a 1% surplus this year. The same as the rest of the countries. So, here we are talking about a situation, which is different from the one presented. There are, of course, also the moral issues, such as the Patsides, the eavesdropping, the cover-ups, scandals that exposed the country internationally. All these were not arguments for New Democracy to rise, but for its percentages to fall. Why did they go up? Because people feared the worst. He decided not out of hope for the best, but out of fear of the worst. We have a duty to fight in the next ten days to have on June 25 a strong, reliable, progressive force to programmatically, reliably and strongly oppose the New Republic. If this does not happen, we will have one of the same, as in previous years: ineffective opposition and arrogant power on the part of the New Democracy system” concluded Mr. Androulakis.