PIRAEUS, Greece — Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the Prime Minister of Greece, has been accused of illegally repelling asylum seekers at sea. He has acknowledged that the State intelligence service tapped the telephone of an Opposition leader. He has consolidated control of the media as press freedom in Greece has fallen to the lowest level in Europe. It’s the sort of thing often scorned by the guardians of the European Union’s values.
But as Greece held national elections on Sunday, Brussels chose to praise Mitsotakis, a pro-European conservative, for stabilizing the Greek economy, sending military aid to Ukraine and providing regional stability at a time of potential distress in Turkey. Above all, the leaders of the European Union appear to have given Mitsotakis freed to do the continent’s ugly job on migrants, showing how much Europe has changed, with crackdowns once associated with the right becoming mainstream.
“I am helping Europe on many fronts,” Mitsotakis, 55, said May 16 in the port city of Piraeus, where he held a rally with voters. “He has bought us reasonable goodwill.”
Mitsotakis argued that after the arrival of more than a million migrants and asylum seekers destabilized the continent’s politics by entering via Greece during the refugee crisis of 2015 and 2016, Europe had accepted Greece’s tougher approach. Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, has called Greece’s border surveillance the “shield” of Europe.
“I think we have been able to change the European approach to migration,” said Mitsotakis, a self-described progressive who leads the nominally center-right New Democracy party. “I don’t know what it is, if a right-wing or central policy, but I have to protect my borders.”
In turn, Europe seems to have protected Mitsotakis.
Alberto Alemanno, a professor of EU law at the HEC business school in Paris, said the special treatment of Mitsotakis stems from his closeness to von der Leyen and his willingness to build — with bloc funding — a vast network of migrant centers that have proven politically popular in Greece.
Mitsotakis and his party won Sunday’s election decisively but fell short of the majority required to lead a one-party government, setting the stage for another vote in a few weeks’ time as he appeared to rule out forming a coalition government.
Before the election, Greeks spoke about how Mitsotakis had made once-immigrant islands habitable again, how he had been the first Greek prime minister to be invited to speak to a joint session of Congress in Washington and how he had stood his ground against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. They appreciated how he had cut taxes and debt and increased digitization, minimum wages and pensions.
Greece’s debt crisis in 2010 almost sank the EU. Humiliating bailouts followed, and a decade of strict austerity policies—led by Germany—cut pensions and public services, contracted economic output, soared unemployment and caused thousands of Greeks to flee.
In 2015, under the leadership of Alexis Tsipras of the leftist Syriza party, the Greeks voted to reject Europe’s aid package with its many conditions, and the country was nearly kicked out of the eurozone. Tsipras eventually carried out the required reviews and moderated in subsequent years, arguing that Greece was on the road to recovery.
But in 2019 he lost to Mitsotakis — the son of a former Prime Minister, educated at the elite American universities Harvard and Stanford — who seemed the personification of the establishment. He promised to right the Greek ship.
“This was always my bet,” Mitsotakis said. “And I think we delivered.”
Niki Kitsantonis and Matina Stevis-Gridneff contributed reporting to this article.
By: JASON HOROWITZ
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6729334, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-05-24 23:00:07
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