Opposition leader says the ‘sooner’ gov’t out, the ‘better’

Conservative leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis delivered his closing speech to New Democracy’s 10th annual congress on Sunday saying, “The sooner [Prime Minister Alexis] Tsipras and his crowd leave, the better” it will be for the country.

The government’s lack of credibility, he said, rendered it a lame duck while its policies are inexorably leading Greece to “a fourth bailout.”

Mitsotakis, who presided over his first congress as party president, dubbed the SYRIZA-led coalition as the “worst government” the country has seen since the fall of the military dictatorship in 1974.

The demand by Greece’s international creditors for contingency measures in case it doesn’t meet its fiscal targets, was, he said, yet another indication of the government’s lack of credibility.

It’s the government’s “lack of credibility that is costing us 3.6 billion euros in contingency measures,” he said at the much anticipated party congress, which sought to define conservative credentials on a more center-right platform, as it had come under criticism in recent years for allegedly veering too far to the right under his predecessor and former prime minister Antonis Samaras.

The aim, Mitsotakis insisted, is to attract citizens who believe in “Greece’s democratic and European character” and are opposed to “the dangerous demagogic extremes.”

“We represent the middle class… and the majority of citizens who want Greece to be a modern European society… and those that choose pragmatism over ideological fixations.”

These citizens, he added, are from across party lines and “it will be easier now for them to rally alongside us,” he said.