The Alternate Minister of National Defence Dimitris Vitsas in an interview that he gave on Sunday, January 22, 2017, on SKAI TV to journalist Giorgos Aftias stated, among other things:
About the new President of the USA Donald trump:
The government aims to cooperate with the USA to the benefit of our country. My conviction is that the situation in the world is not good. There are too many wars, too much poverty, too many austerity measures. There are two problems to be solved:
One of them regards Europe which must play a new role at this time. This is Europe of democracy, social cohesion and European acquis. But, European policy has to change too.
The second problem which has become our duty is that the Left, instead of fighting its values and principles, it must implement these values and principles. It would be much more convenient for our government to have a strong force of the Left all over Europe. Efforts are made, however, we are before a situation with many elections in 2017, in which nationalist parties seem to rise too and the main problem is the racist views; this is what we have to fight and defeat. Democracy is a system that requires for a constant renewal, α constant change.
About the question on the probability of election in 2017:
There is no reason for an election to be held and I cannot understand why the issue is raised, apart from the effort of the opposition parties to maintain it so that they have such a scenario to express. At this time, our country faces much more important issues such as the completion of the second assessment, such as the quantitative easing, such as the issues of our everyday lives on which we must focus on two directions, the one is Greece itself and the other one is what is going on with that as far as the participation of Greece in Europe is concerned.
Every time we must discuss the issue in a specific framework. This is that the country is under supervision and that it is under a policy specified by memoranda and at the same time we must protect the most vulnerable population groups. In this framework and with the money and the capabilities that we have – not without any mistakes and not without any omissions which are not deliberate – we do our best.
About the leader of New Democracy party Kyriakos Mitsotakis:
New Democracy cadres have the capability to do mistaken estimations and, on the other hand, to be in a permanent crisis of strategy. What Mr. Mitsotakis says is “step aside, so some other people who have a plan may come up”. Which means “so that we come back”, the old political system which allegedly did everything and did it well; that is it was good that they put us in the policies of the memoranda, it was good that Mr. Mitsotakis and his associates closed hospitals, schools, fired too many people, that is all this was good and they should come again and repeat it.
We are in a battle, with hardships, we have undertaken a duty, yet we are the first power which, when its programme changed, we stood with courage before the Greek people who decided to give the battle together with SYRIZA in this difficult period. This happened with the elections. In this battle we are devoted and target-oriented and we will go on. Election will be held in 2019. However, this is a different thing from what they do in New Democracy, namely hiding their plans.
At this moment, we are fighting a battle for the assessment to be completed. Our financial associates and the government are working too hard on that. What people do not see is what the financial associates do to speed up the procedure and solve the constant financial disagreements between the institutions. What we are concerned with is that it will not be Greece, Greek people and entire Europe that will be considered responsible for this situation.
About the negotiation:
No measures are needed and when we say measures we also include the tax exemption limit and everything else is at stake. At this time what you can do is describe, if things are not good in 2019, the same rules that are applied today will be applied too. But to me it is obvious that no measures can be voted now. This is impossible. First the programme must have been completed; Mr. Tsipras must have announced that Greece is no longer under supervision.
We will not surrender. What they did not understand is that I will reiterate what Euclid Tsakalotos says in an interview today: We can describe measures which, if needed – but I am saying that it will not be needed – can be taken in 2019. And the government spokesperson comes and says that some measures might have been considered to be adopted after the completion of the programme, like the cuts that are predicted today, but without us having to vote for these measures now. However, we, until now, have not activated any of these procedures that we call cuts, on the contrary we gave. And we might give again. At this moment we have a surplus and a part of this surplus should be returned to people.
