Zoe Konstantopoulou, president of the Greek opposition party Plefsi Eleftherias (Course of Freedom), has filed a parliamentary question to Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, accusing his government of presenting a picture of the economy that clashes with the reality faced by Greek households struggling with the cost of living.
The question is titled "The economic policy, practices and tactics of the New Democracy government in relation to Public Money, the so-called 'Public Debt' and the astronomical Party Debts of the Governing Party."
Konstantopoulou said the image of a robust economy that the government had once again tried to present clashed directly with the lived experience of a society hit by high prices, profiteering, the shrinking of real purchasing power and real wage values, spending cuts, and the refusal to pay bonuses and salaries owed to workers. She said the same picture applied to the wider erosion of core areas of the social state, including public health, public education, justice and social welfare.
Contrast with lawmakers' finances
She also pointed to what she called the same contradiction between the dramatically worsening financial situation of households and citizens, and the spectacular improvement in the financial position of MPs from the governing party in recent years.
Early debt repayment figures
Konstantopoulou said the government's decisions on "early repayment" of the country's so-called public debt had already led to the disbursement of 36 billion euros, according to the prime minister's own statements, while it had simultaneously announced a further early repayment of 13 billion euros.
Taken together, she said, this meant the government had spent or committed to spend 49 billion euros on early repayment of the alleged public debt over the past seven years.
She said this had happened while the government refused to allocate sufficient public resources to upgrade public health, civil protection, public education, social security and justice, and while it stubbornly refused to restore the 13th and 14th month salaries and bonuses owed to employees across the wider public sector.
According to Konstantopoulou, restoring the 13th and 14th salaries would cost 2.1 billion euros a year, or 14.7 billion euros over seven years, less than a third of the sum the government has put toward debt repayment without any public consultation, a debt she argued should be challenged rather than repaid.
Who is Zoe Konstantopoulou
Konstantopoulou is a lawyer who served as speaker of the Greek Parliament in 2015 under the first government led by Alexis Tsipras and the Syriza party, before later founding Plefsi Eleftherias. New Democracy, the governing conservative party led by Mitsotakis, has been in power in Greece since 2019.
Four questions to the prime minister
Konstantopoulou put four questions to the prime minister. She asked where he derived the legitimacy to withhold public money earmarked for public spending on society while readily prepaying it to the country's creditors, money she said does not belong to him.
She asked whether his decision was related to what she called the scandalous tolerance shown toward his own party's debts.
She also asked how he explained the fact that, while trying to present himself as a "prudent prime minister who is reducing the country's debts," he was at the same time the head of a party whose own debts increase every year and whose deputy leader has stated brazenly that they will never be repaid.
Finally, she asked whether he would give an account of the overall economic management of both the public finances and his party over the past seven years, so that citizens could draw their own conclusions.
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