ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Greece’s main opposition leader has slammed the country’s prime minister as a danger to the nation for his role in a wiretapping scandal that has stung the government in the runup to elections to be held later this year.
Speaking Friday at the end of a three-day parliament debate on a no-confidence motion he filed earlier in the week, Syriza party leader Alexis Tsipras accused Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis of personally ordering a series of wiretaps, the targets of which have included high-ranking politicians, government ministers and military officers.
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“You knew very well that the surveillance had occurred, and you knew very well that the surveillance had occurred because you had ordered it, Mr. Mitsotakis,” Tsipras said.
Lawmakers are to vote on the motion later Friday. With the governing center-right New Democracy party holding a comfortable majority of 156 seats in the 300-member parliament, the vote is expected to fail. When he filed the motion, Tsipras — who has accused Mitsotakis of running away from previous opportunities to speak on the wiretapping scandal — said it would force the prime minister to answer on his role in it.
“Your stance might have become a joke, but this joke is dangerous for democracy and for the nation,” Tsipras said, addressing the prime minister.
The wiretapping scandal broke in earnest in August, when a top government aide and the head of the country’s intelligence agency resigned following revelations that a Socialist politician who was later elected as head of Greece’s third largest party had been under telephone surveillance. Mitsotakis insisted at the time that the wiretapping was legal but improper, and that had he known about it he would not have approved it.
Allegations that other senior officials, journalists and cabinet members had also been targeted with spyware that can snoop on cell phone calls, stored contacts and data, and access devices’ microphones and cameras prompted a judicial investigation.
Speaking in Parliament on Wednesday, Tsipras said Greece’s Authority for Communication Security and Privacy had confirmed, following a request he had made to it for further information, that others who had also been placed under telephone surveillance included the government’s own labor minister, the head of the National Defense General Staff, the former head of the army, a former national security adviser, and the former and current heads of defense armaments.
He accused Mitsotakis of “setting up an Orwellian dystopia” and of masterminding what he called a “criminal network” running the wiretaps.
“How patriotic is it for you to have under surveillance the leadership of the armed forces? I ask you,” Tsipras said during Friday’s heated parliamentary debate.
Although still ahead of Syriza in opinion polls, New Democracy has seen its strong lead hurt by the scandal as well as by the increased cost of living. Greece is to hold elections in the first half of 2023, although no date has yet been set.
