Opposition accuses government MEP of breaching data protection laws

Opposition parties have alleged that a New Democracy MEP breached data protection regulations in emailing Greek voters overseas ahead of the European Parliament elections in June.

“Expatriate Greeks around the world, from America to Japan, received today an email from New Democracy MEP Anna-Michelle Asimakopoulou as part of her personal pre-election campaign ahead of the European elections,” main opposition party SYRIZA said in a statement, pointing out that many of recipients of this email have gone on the record to state that they never provided Asimakopoulou with permission to email them, as is required under the EU’s GDPR data regulation.

On Friday, many voters took to social media to say that Asimakopoulou’s surprise email landed in their inboxes within minutes of them receiving an email from the Interior Ministry informing them that postal voting for expatriates will apply in the next general election.

“What is even more worrying is that many of the complainants had registered themselves on the foreign postal voting lists using their email addresses,” the SYRIZA statement continued, referring to the incident as “a very serious blow to the integrity of the electoral process, shortly before the elections with the new postal voting procedure.”

PASOK said “the government must immediately provide an explanation as to how personal contact information was leaked, which the Ministry of the Interior had in its possession and according to standard practice are confidential when the electoral lists are made public.”

In a tweet, Asimakopoulou described the allegations as “mudslinging” and “conspiracy theories.”

“One hundred days before the European elections, my office sent a newsletter to Greeks abroad using contact information that I collected during the last five years as an MEP, in order to ask their permission to communicate with them regularly, as I always have done, with respect to personal data and GDPR since 2018.”

“I have never received personal data from the Interior Ministry or any other government body on Greeks living abroad,” she said.

However, dozens of Greeks living abroad replied to her message that they had not subscribed to any newsletter or party list and asked how she came into possession of their email addresses. Personal details of Greeks abroad who register to vote, such as emails and phone numbers, are not accessible to political parties, and are supposed to be available exclusively to the Interior Ministry.

The Communist Party (KKE) and Yanis Varoufakis’ MeRA25 also criticized Asimakopoulou’s email.