The Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, characterized the inflammatory statements of the Turkish side as non-existent, legally and politically absurd, in his interview with SKAI, adding that he has no reason to enter into a game of verbal confrontations with the Turkish leadership.
“Our friends on the other side of the Aegean may feel that there is some internal pressure and they want to change the agenda due to the many problems that the Turkish economy has,” he noted.
He stressed that Greece has an obligation to arm itself rationally and to be a strong deterrent force, not an offensive force, but a defensive one.
“And anyone who challenges sovereignty, sovereign rights, will know very well that if we did not reach the point of no return, we would reach a conflict, that the price they would pay would be very heavy.”
Regarding the acquisition of Rafale, he said: “I am very pleased that we have managed and completed a complex purchase within 18 months. The first Rafale have already landed. Our pilots are already familiar with the aircraft. I think it is very important that we have abolished 50% of the tax on the flight allowance. It is a thank you to our pilots but also to the staff of the Underwater Disaster Teams, to the pilots of our helicopters.
“We can not spend what we spend on defense, which are very significant amounts, and not spend the minimum to support the incomes of these people who do a very great and very difficult job,” he concluded.
For the pandemic
Asked to answer when the end of the restrictive measures will come, the prime minister was categorical that “we are not done with the pandemic yet”.
He added: “But we are on a good path. We are on the right track because we have an escalation of cases. We are on the right track because we have a de-escalation of the intubated. We have several deaths unfortunately.
The truth is that some of the deaths, which are reported, are deaths of patients who may die from other causes, ‘with Covid’, not ‘from Covid’. Watch this distinction because we have always been the strictest in Europe in how we recorded deaths and this is something that obviously there is no way to change, this is the recording of deaths, so we will continue. But not all European countries do it the same way.
Regarding the course of vaccinations, he pointed out that we have reached 84% of the adults who have been vaccinated. “We have 300,000 of our fellow citizens who did the two installments but did not do the third, I ask them to go do the booster dose, have already lost the privileges of the certificate. They did it out of negligence, probably because they did not go to be vaccinated.
And I will still I encourage our fellow citizens who have not yet been vaccinated. Now we have a new vaccine with another technology which we will make available to the public, for those who may have – completely unjustified, in my opinion – some fear of existing vaccines. “But even today, our fellow citizens who are losing their lives are elderly, usually unvaccinated.”
Easter and tourist season
Asked when the market is expected to open, Mr. Mitsotakis said: “We will go from open to good. At first gradually, carefully. We always listen to the checks of the experts.
If you ask me if things will be much better at Easter, yes, at Easter I estimate that things will be much better. And of course we are not only interested in Easter. This year the tourist season will start earlier than any other year.
It will start, I believe, from March very dynamically. I believe that we will have an excellent tourist year, all the indications show this at the moment and it is very important, as we did in 2020 and 2021, to send clear messages to visitors who prefer to come to Greece, that they will come , will find a safe country with specific rules.
And I am sure that this year we will be much more open and our tourism will work much better, we will have much more visitors than we had last year, where last year we far exceeded our most optimistic forecasts “.
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