Main opposition New Democracy (ND) leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis on Wednesday added his voice to the ongoing debate in Europe concerning over the Union’s policy regarding refugees and efforts to deal with irregular immigration, as Mediterranean EU-members have borne the brunt of problem over recent years.
Speaking in Salzburg during a European Peoples Party (EPP) session, he underlined that Europe’s “first priority today is to provide security to its citizens … and the effective guarding of our borders must be our first priority.”
In a direct criticism of the current leftist-rightist coalition government in Athens, Mitsotakis charged that Greece, where the migrant/refugee crisis exploded in 2015, is now essentially absent from this debate.
The center-right political leader stepped up his criticism by saying that the concept of “guarding borders” is something that doesn’t exist in the Tsipras government’s vocabulary. He also charged that the mostly leftist government refuses to acknowledge any distinction between war refugees and would-be economic migrants.
“The third reason (for Athens’ absence) is, unfortunately, that during this government’s tenure, the hellish Moria hotspot was created, which insults the very concept of human dignity and defames the country abroad. This, despite the fact that hundreds of millions of euros have allocated to deal with the refugee problem, money which, it seems, has been lost in the dark corridors of government murkiness,” he said.
On the sidelines of the EPP, Mitsotakis met with German MEP Manfred Weber, the leader of the EPP’s parliament group in the European Parliament, as well as European Investment Bank (EIB) vice-president Alexander Stubb.
