“SYRIZA has and has today clearly positioned itself in favor of the vote of all Greek men and women abroad, with the proposal to elect a specific number of deputies and to have this right and possibility for all Greeks abroad”, emphasized Sokratis Famellos in the debate in the Parliament on the bill for the vote of expatriates, calling on the prime minister to answer why he does not accept this proposal of SYRIZA, which “is also the proposal of the expatriates”.

The president of the KO of SYRIZA PS pointed out that SYRIZA tabled an amendment that restates the party’s proposal to create four expatriate constituencies so that Greeks abroad can elect their own representatives, as they constantly request. “Answer us: do you want the voice of emigrants to exist in the parliament?”, he noted, addressing Mr. Mitsotakis.

He accused the government of bringing a bill “hastily, hastily, without any disposition for consensus, an arrangement, because now it judges that it is in its interest to make up the parliament to pass what it wants” and that thus “undermines and circumvents the constitutional provision and the spirit of the Constitution”.

Mr. Famellos emphasized that “the expatriate community should not be integrated into the domestic party confrontation in terms of a party audience” and that this is why the proposal of the SYRIZA amendment “but also the expatriate one, is the single supra-party ballot, but the government rejects it”. “When you hypocritically ask if we want the votes of the emigrants to count, we want to implement what the emigrants are asking for, that their own votes do not count party-wise, but that they have their own single inter-party and supra-party ballot. This is what you have to focus on,” he emphasized. He commented that this question reveals the anxiety of the government, which “is vote hunting”. “You are not interested in having expatriate MPs in here and this is an insult to these people”, “because you do not listen to expatriates and involve them in your party interests”, he said.

At the same time, he underlined that it is necessary to make it easier for Greeks living in the territory who work far from their constituencies to exercise their right to vote. He commented that it is surprising that the government shows interest in how the Greeks abroad will be facilitated, “but does nothing for the Greeks who, due to their livelihood, are in other regions”. He said that this choice of the government “also shows the extent of the hypocrisy”, stressing that in order to reveal this, the SYRIZA PS tabled the relevant amendment.

Starting his speech with the developments regarding the fires, Mr. Famellos said that “the declared and advertised preparedness is not reflected in the field” and called on the government “to stop managing communications with the doctrine of “evacuation-compensation” and to pass its responsibilities to the municipalities”. He called for the full activation of the public forest fire prevention policy of 2019, reinforcement of the forest service and the fire brigade, better coordination of all involved, implementation of the findings of the Goldammer commission.