PM planning to call political leaders’ meeting next week on health crisis

Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis is planning to call a meeting of the country’s political leaders next Friday to discuss the way forward in the management of the health crisis, government spokesman Christos Tarantilis said on Friday.

The meeting, he said in response to a call for such a gathering made earlier by the head of the main opposition, will be convened in Parliament so that “every party can submit its proposals in the open, and not behind closed doors.”

“Dealing with the pandemic requires honest and realistic proposals. We look forward to them,” Tarantilis told a press briefing in Athens hours after SYRIZA’s Alexis Tsipras met with President Katerina Sakellaropoulou and requested that she call a meeting of political leaders.

Tarantilis also accused Tsipras of being “uninformed” by calling for the Greek government to take the initiative at the European Union level so that the patents to the coronavirus vaccines are released and can be produced domestically or to arrange bilateral agreements, outside the EU framework, for Greece to secure a larger supply of the jabs.

“We would expect Mr Tsipras to be better informed so that his arguments, especially following the meeting with the president, are more precise,” Tarantilis said.

“We inform him that the EU’s 27 member-states have agreed to work together for the purchase of the vaccinations and are not allowed to act unilaterally in this matter, as he demands… Does he propose that we violate this joint European agreement? That would certainly be detrimental to the country,” the government spokesman added.