Main opposition New Democracy (ND) president Kyriakos Mitsotakis again “stayed on message” on Wednesday, promising to cut taxes across the board for individuals and businesses in crisis-battered Greece.
In his latest international press appearance, this time on CNBC, the pro-business and pro-reform center-right leader said an “aggressive and comprehensive” tax reform will begin from the very first month of a future ND government.
General elections in Greece must be held by October 2019, with Mitsotakis’ party leading ruling SYRIZA in all mainstream opinion polls over the past two years. Roughly half of the opinion polls, in fact, give ND a double-digit lead over hard left SYRIZA, even as the latter is attempting a “social democrat” pivot in order to move more towards the center.
CNBC cited ND’s pledge to lower the corporate/business tax rate in thrice bailed-out Greece to 25 percent by 2022, from 29 percent today. Mitsotakis said another aim of his proposed tax overhaul is to again attract significant foreign direct investments.
Moreover, he again charged that the current Tsipras government – up-until-recently a “strange bedfellows” coalition that relied on a small right-wing populist party – cost Greece an additional 100 billion euros over the coming decades with the signing of the third memorandum bailout in the summer of 2015.
He noted that while the third bailout expired in August 2018, Greece has still not fully returned to the markets for its borrowing needs.
Asked what he would have done differently if he were the prime minister in 2015, instead of Alexis Tsipras, the ND president he would not, to begin with, have appointed Yanis Varoufakis as finance minister. He also said he would not have “duped” the Greek voters, something he accused the erstwhile leftist firebrand Tsipras of doing in 2014, making promises he couldn’t keep.
