Mitsotakis promises cabinet changes

New Democracy leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis has promised a different cabinet, including more women, in case he wins an outright majority in the June 25 election, as current opinion polls indicate.

Mitsotakis’ new cabinet will also be a larger one, since he has said he will create a new Demographics and Housing Policy ministry, saying that the current Labor Ministry is too unwieldy; Mitsotakis has also indicated he will split the Infrastructure and Transport ministry in two.

Besides the women, a new cabinet may contain many familiar faces in new roles: Mitsotakis has used the term “rotation” to indicate what sort of changes he will make to his cabinet.

One thing he will not take into account into forming his cabinet, Mitsotakis claims, is how to balance different factions within the party or the prospective ministers’ vote-getting in the May 21 election, even though this is a clear individual achievement. He has repeated that this election, in which people will vote for lists and not individual candidates, is all about parties and not individuals.

One of the early bills in the new Parliament will be about policy, with cuts in a number of taxes and levies, and a higher taxable income threshold. Cuts in indirect taxes will have to wait until the country can maintain steady primary surpluses – that is, excluding servicing Greece’s debt.

In an interview to TV station Ant1, Mitsotakis said that, in contrast to his main rivals, the left-wing Syriza and the socialist PASOK, he has no hidden agenda, especially one of heavier taxation, as he accused his rivals of harboring. He said that he kept to his pre-election promises of 2019 during his first four-year term.

“New Democracy will continue the tax-cutting policy,” Mitsotakis declared during his interview. This, according to opinion polls, proved popular, alongside minimum wage raises and subsidies targeting lower incomes.