In the afternoon, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis attended a lunch with members of the Greek community in the United States and representatives of expatriate organizations, at the residence of the Permanent Representative of Greece to the United Nations, in New York.

In his greeting at the start of the event, the Prime Minister, referring to the Cyprus issue, emphasized: “I want to reiterate here my firm commitment to a solution to the Cyprus issue that will fully respect the decisions of the United Nations Security Council. As far as Greece is concerned, any solution outside these parameters, any idea or any discussion of a two-state solution is simply unacceptable. This is something I had the opportunity to communicate again today to President Erdoğan.”

Regarding the disasters caused by the bad weather “Daniel”, Kyriakos Mitsotakis noted: “The country is resilient. The economy is doing well. We will recover from this natural disaster, with some help from our European friends and also from the Greeks, from within and from abroad. We will not just rebuild what was destroyed by the water, but we will make sure that we rebuild it better, because what we experienced this summer was the reality of the climate crisis, which affects us all. It is our obligation to ensure that we find a durable response to phenomena that will occur with greater frequency. This is a fact and we must respond.”

With regard to the course of the Greek economy and the upgrading of the country’s creditworthiness at the investment level, the Prime Minister stated: “I had committed, before the election campaign, that we would recover the investment grade within three months and we succeeded. It is perhaps the last step in this long and arduous process to put a very painful decade behind us.

The economy is indeed doing extremely well. We are growing at a much higher rate than the rest of the eurozone. Not only will there not be a recession in Greece, but we believe we will grow more than 2% this year. We continue to attract significant foreign investment, we constantly strengthen the Greek brand in various sectors and ensure that Greece has a greater weight than its typical size, whether it is about issues related to the European Union or about our wider region”.

Mitsotakis

Regarding the first law passed after the elections, which ensures the removal of all obstacles to the voting of Greeks abroad from their permanent place of residence, Kyriakos Mitsotakis said: “If you are registered in the electoral rolls you can vote from here or from wherever you are in the next election. The next elections are the European elections and I think this is a very important success, it is a national success, we succeeded and removed all the obstacles that the previous law had. I think that in this way there will be a much more active participation of the Greeks abroad, the diaspora, the diaspora of the United States, in the citizens of our homeland. This greater, more systematic participation in the public will only do good, and I am especially glad that we succeeded and convinced the other parties that we should move in this direction.”