Athens: Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said on Friday that he does not intend to hold early parliamentary elections at the opposition's demand over a scandal around wiretapping of an opposition politician and a journalist.
"You demand elections. In this situation of instability, you demand that the country go into two- or three-month twists and turns without calculating what it means for the homeland," Mitsotakis said, addressing the opposition during a parliamentary debate.
Holding snap elections would aggravate current political instability and undermine the country's security, he added, asking the leader of the opposition Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA), Alexis Tsipras, to think about the consequences of appointing an interim government for the election period, with ministers who are not in the picture of current state of affairs and active work of "foreign centers" aimed at destabilizing the situation in Greece.
"I will pay the political price and lead the country to a stable port. We will overcome this difficult winter. I will not back down," the prime minister claimed, adding that "at the end of the four-year term, we will go to the polls, and the sovereign Greek people will decide who they want to see as their leader for the next four years."
A political scandal erupted in Greece in late July regarding the wiretapping by Predator spyware of the mobile phones of Nikos Androulakis, the leader of the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) and journalist Thanasis Koukakis. The Greek prime minister's secretary general, Grigoris Dimitriadis, and the head of the National Intelligence Service, Panagiotis Kontoleon, resigned over the scandal.
|