Tsipras urges PM to resign over wiretapping allegations
The leader of Greece’s leftist opposition on Monday urged Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis to resign amid a phone tapping scandal still under investigation.
“How can we possibly go to election with this case being unresolved?,” SYRIZA leader Alexis Tsipras told Open TV.
“The government’s most recent narrative is that the prime minister is not implicated, but is inadequate… He is my political rival, but he is not an idiot; he has the ability to understand what is going on, to control and monitor the people he works with. He is culpable, which is why he has been hiding for all these months,” Tsipras said.
“If he still does not step up after everything that has happened, if he does resign, he will be committing yet another crime; because the biggest crime of all would be to accept that such things happen,” he said.
Reports over the weekend claimed that Labor and Social Security Minister Kostis Hatzidakis was wiretapped by the country’s intelligence service (EYP) in 2020.
Hatzidakis reacted to the reports saying that “there is not even the slightest possibility that [the prime minister] is involved in this whole story.”
Greece’s parliament on Friday passed a bill reforming EYP and banning the sale of spyware following allegations that senior government officials and journalists had been targeted by shadowy surveillance software.
