The cabinet will meet on Friday without any changes, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said on Tuesday in an interview to Alpha TV on the Tuesday following European elections.
Speaking of the election on Sunday in which ruling New Democracy received 28.31% of the vote, below its hoped-for target of 33%, Mitsotakis said in the station's central newscast, "It was a difficult pre-election campaign, tiring, and I believe gave it my all." After thanking his team, he added, "The result was surely not what we expected, and that makes me be both concerned and, in a strange way, also relieved. This is because I believe in the wisdom of the Greek people. If the Greek people wanted in its way to convey a message, I think it is better to have conveyed it now, since we have three more years ahead. My duty is to decode the electoral messages correctly and to move toward those corrective actions that will show citizens we did take their message into account."
Mitsotakis said "we did not manage to provide content to the European dimension of the elections, but there were also a lot of citizens who wanted to send us a message." But at the same time, he noted, "the entire opposition was denounced," especially the opposition based on inexistent funding for their programs. The disdain for the opposition, the PM said, "is an indication of maturity in society, that it denounced easy solutions."
Among other issues, the premier also admitted that the law on equality in marriage, allowing civil marriage between same-sex people, hurt New Democracy at the polls, but he said that he still believes in it and will not go back on that belief.
Speaking of voters' high expectations, he said that "I was the one who raised the expectations bar, and when I pass under it for whatever reason - I do not think I do it constantly, I think I have done a lot of things for Greece - but I ought to rally and see what I can do to pass over the bar of expectations as well." He asserted that "we will not lower the bar, we shall jump higher. I am adamant about that. Whether we succeed or not, citizens will judge that at the end of the four-year term. But the expectations bar of this government will not drop."