Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis participated in a discussion with author Pascal Bruckner, at an event organised by iefimerida.gr, at the American School of Classical Studies. The discussion was moderated by Lamprini Rori, Assistant Professor in Political Analysis at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.
The Prime Minister’s remarks follow:
In his introductory statement, analysing the result of the US elections, the Prime Minister noted:
First of all, it’s a real pleasure to be able to have this discussion. Thank you to iefimerida for organising it. I just finished one of your recent books, which I found interesting and provocative, and I’m sure that we’ll be able to discuss some of the topics that you debate in it now.
The American election, of course, is probably the most important event of 2024, in an electoral cycle where all incumbents have lost elections. I think this should tell us something about the difficulties of dealing with a cost of living crisis, in spite of the fact that the headline figures of the US economy have been rather positive.
I see three issues of great importance. The first, “it is the economy, stupid”, and it was the economy in these elections as well, because a lot of people felt that the cost of living crisis was just too important, too big to ignore. You look at GDP figures, but they don’t tell the whole story if you feel that you have difficulties making ends meet, whether it’s mortgages, paying off your credit cards, or even being able to get through the month and I’m afraid that the Democrats did not address this issue head-on and were hiding behind the headline figures of the economy, without understanding what they meant at the micro level.
I think this is a very good lesson for all of us because at the end of the day, it is not the overall figures of GDP growth that make a difference. It is whether this GDP growth is translated into better wages, lower taxes, more disposable income. At least this is what we’re trying to do in Greece.
The second issue which we cannot ignore is immigration. Immigration played a huge role. Essentially, the whole border management system of the US collapsed during the Biden years. There was this general impression also by many people that whoever dared to raise this question was considered to be inhumane and not considerate regarding the needs of the people who wanted to enter the US.
So, what started, in its profound logic, as a system to accommodate a few people fleeing war and prosecution, essentially became a carte blanche for anyone to enter into the US.
As much as the US is a country of immigrants, this illegal migration was simply not tolerated by many people, including the legal migrants. Those people who entered the US legally, who waited for many years to get their green card and their citizenship, felt that they were essentially cheated out of this complicated process by those who entered illegally.
Of course, I don’t think it was the main driver of the election, but issues of identity did play an important role. This sense by many people that the educated elites were only talking about issues related to culture and identity and not talking about their problems. Go back to the statement made by Hillary Clinton in 2016, referring to “the deplorables”. Who were “the deplorables”? “The deplorables” were people who felt that their voices were not being heard by the elites, who felt that their concerns were not being taken care of, who felt that the policymakers treated them with a degree of arrogance and distance. They were craving for respect, and respect is critical in politics.
Those who treat people without respect simply because they may not have a college degree or because they may culturally think differently from those who populate the universities or the big cities were in for a rude awakening.
So, if I were to prioritise the three issues, I think that were the drivers of the election: inflation, immigration, and an excessive focus on identity politics on the side of the Democrats.
Regarding the presidential election campaigns of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, the Prime Minister stated:
One quick point, which I think is important, which you raised. Energy. He’s 78 years old, and he was giving 2-3 speeches a day. These were one-hour speeches. His opponent was taking three days off to prepare for an interview. It doesn’t work that way. If you do campaigns, you have to give that speech and the additional speech, and your voice has to be hoarse, and you really have to demonstrate that you actually want it. I’m not sure that the younger candidate demonstrated that she wanted it more than the older candidate. This projection of actually wanting to win was very, very clear when you saw him. I was watching, it was surprising because I think you’re absolutely right about what happened during the last two months of the campaign.
I was watching CNN, which is not a pro-Trump network, and everything was dominated by Trump. Everything. He was there for the good things or the bad things he said, but he dominated the airwaves. Of course, he was gutsy enough to go to non-traditional media, to go to podcasts, to go to media that normally our protective media teams would tell us, “Don’t go there. Something could go wrong”. So he was taking risks. But after all, if you speak the way he does, there are no risks because you can say anything. So if you can say anything, nothing is risky. So he actually managed to carve out this niche for himself, and he ended up dominating the news cycle.
Asked about the impact of the woke culture, the Prime Minister pointed out:
My kids are at American universities now, and I was studying in the US 35 years ago, and there has been a clear change in terms of the public debate in US universities. Not that these issues are necessarily new. Issues of political correctness, the limits to the right of free speech were discussed even when I was at university 35 years ago.
I remember one of my professors, his name is Harvey C. Mansfield, very powerful conservative. He said something in 1991, which is still very much relevant today. If you have the right to speak, you also have the duty to listen.
I’m afraid that this duty to listen has been lost in what we call US woke culture, where groups seek to promote division, anger, and conflict, where speaking is not so much about making your argument, but it is about provoking the other. That, for me, is very different from traditional liberalism. Essentially, it is the definition of illiberalism, where a minority is trying to impose its own will upon a majority.
The tyranny of the majority was a concept promoted by John Stuart Mill in order to ensure that in democracies, we have a framework that protects the rights of minorities. Now we are at the other level. We have the tyranny of the minorities that do not allow anyone to question their opinion. If you dare to question their opinion, you are labelled a fascist, a patriarch, or whatever else one can imagine.
This woke culture does not exist in Europe. It certainly does not exist in Greece. If it’s up to me, I would never want it to exist in Greece. What should never confuse the protection of fundamental human rights, which is a tenet of liberalism, with the direction that what we define as woke culture has taken in the US, where the debate has become so divisive that it is no longer a debate.
We were talking about class conflict during the years when we were studying Marxism. Now we talk about identity conflict which is even more difficult to address and to try to forge a consensus. Sometimes, honestly, I wouldn’t want to be a young man at a US University these days trying to date a girl. I would not want to do that because I would have to sign a petition or I would have to have my door open. But this is the reality of what is happening in many US universities.
Certainly, it’s not happening in Europe. I think Europe has a healthy balance between traditional liberalism, protecting rights, emancipating women.
I think the fact that, for example, we talk about a woman participation in the workforce, which is a big issue in Greece, that we address issues such as the #MeToo movement, the right of women to actually speak in case that they are abused, which has been a big success of our policies, that they feel that they can trust the police, and that they can call the police in case that they feel they’re abused. But this is very far from what is currently happening in the liberal or the ultra liberal bastions in the US.
I do understand why this extreme version of what I call ‘illiberal wokeism’ is provoking some reactions amongst people who just don’t accept this approach.
If people feel that a party talks too much about these issues, then the flip side is that you don’t talk enough about the issues that one really cares about. The number one issue that the traditional constituency of the Democratic Party cared about was inequality, but economic inequality, not racial inequality, not gender inequality. People were screaming in the focus groups: “we have difficulty making ends meet, so don’t talk to me about these issues”. They may be important for some people, but the focus of the debate was completely wrong.
The truth is that this was also very much exploited by the Republicans. Some of the ads that aired were very, very… I would never endorse them personally, but they were very powerful in terms of who represents who in this election. I very much agree with you. I think it is our obligation in Europe, we have a very strong traditional protection of human rights. It is enshrined in a European convention. That is why I think it is important to ensure that one can talk about human rights, about a progressive agenda, without falling victim to the extremes that we’ve seen to a certain extent in France, but certainly in the US.
That’s why I think it’s wrong to talk about woke, certainly in Greece, this debate simply does not exist. We’re a country, for example, and look at things like the extremes of the US. On the one hand, we talk about woke, and on the other hand, we talk about banning abortion, which was one of the big topics. In Greece, abortion has been legalised for many years. Reproductive rights are protected. I think we have been good at balancing progress without falling into the temptation of a debate that is simply too polarising. This, thank God, has not happened in Greece, and I don’t think it will.
On the challenges facing governments in Western democracies and the dangers of populism, Kyriakos Mitsotakis stressed:
You asked a very broad question. Let me first start with the observation that governing these days has become an incredibly complex task. I’m not just referring to Greece. If you look at the challenges that we have to address in this extremely unpredictable world, economic inequality, managing different expectations, climate change, artificial intelligence, people expect a lot from their governments. Frequently, when they feel that the governments don’t deliver, they get angry, frustrated and of course, the populist voices are always there to promise them easy solutions to complicated tasks. It is actually easy to be tempted by these parties or these charismatic politicians.
In Greece, we went through our own populist reaction to what was happening before many other countries. That was in 2015 when we elected essentially the Syriza government. The first thing that Syriza did was to partner with a party from the extreme right, just to prove that when it comes to populist, ideology is not that important. It is power and staying in power that is critical.
What has happened in many of those democracies that are sliding towards illiberal democracy is related to the fact that institutions get gradually undermined, which then gives the possibility to a populist leader to win again. And the more he wins, the more he puts constraints on the constitutional checks and balances, the more he goes after the opposition, and then he can stay because it’s usually a he, not a she. When we talk about autocrats, I can think of only one woman in the world who can be deemed as an autocratic leader, and she’s also no longer. She also lost her job. I’m referring to the leader of Bangladesh. So that is the way democracies are eroded. We managed to buck the trend in Greece. But managing complicated tasks and delivering results is never easy.
In Greece, we succeeded in winning a second election by an increased share of the vote because we basically stuck to what we promised and we didn’t raise expectations too high, and we delivered on our fundamental electoral commitments. That’s, I think, how you build, fundamentally, a relationship of trust.
But moving to the big topics that you touched upon, and in particular, the position of Europe in this very, very complicated world, there’s no doubt in my mind that we have reached an inflection point where we need to wake up from our geopolitical and economic naivete. Essentially, this is the time to actually do it.
When Donald Trump -I think it was 2017 or 2018, I was not in power then- walked into this NATO meeting and called the countries one after the other, asking them if they were spending 2% of their GDP on defence, he was fundamentally right in terms that it was very convenient for us to take advantage of this peace dividend, to spend 1% of GDP on defence, or to pretend to essentially have an army, because we had the USA committing to our protection. It was also very convenient for Germany, for example, to constantly export to China and to rely on very cheap Russian gas in order to ensure that its industry remained competitive. All these assumptions have been thrown out of the window, all of them. So, obviously, we need a dramatic response.
I’m sure you have read the Draghi report. It is a very, very good document that essentially explains why Europe needs to do much more. But in order to do more, it also needs to have the means to do more. I think the fundamental question going into the next European cycle will be, first of all, can we agree to make these changes to ensure that the decisions taken by the European Council address the main challenges that we face? And will we find the money to actually finance the big investment boom that we all recognise is necessary?
Because if we believe that we can address climate change, maintain our social model, strengthen our defence, be leaders in artificial intelligence with the means that we have at our disposal, this is a fantasy. We, at least, need to recognise that in order to do all those things, we need structural changes, we need to mobilise private capital, what we call a capital markets union, which is the ability for European companies not to go to the US to raise capital, but to do it at the European level.
We need to recognise that a company, you referred to Elon Musk, a company like Tesla would never have made it in Europe. It would never have made it in Europe because we essentially have 27 different regulatory regimes. We have a single market that doesn’t really work, and we don’t reward risk the way the US does in terms of the capital markets. And, at the same time, we need to spend more as a European Union. We have the capacity to do so. We did so when we addressed the pandemic.
I was part of these five-day negotiations when we put together the Recovery and Resilience Fund. I remember Angela Merkel at the time saying: “No, no, no this will never happen”, because essentially what we did was to issue European debt, but we didn’t call it exactly that way until she realised that it was necessary to do so and it has been incredibly successful.
So, we have the blueprint for raising funds at the European level, but we need to overcome internal sort of differences, concepts of frugality, as they are advocated by some of the northern countries, and to understand that we can only survive in this world if we are united. You’re right. If Europe is united, we’re a big market, we’re a big firepower, we’re the envy of the world. That’s why people want to come to Europe. They want to live in Europe. I mean, they may bash Europe culturally, but they still want to come to Europe and live in Europe.
But are we able to leverage all these strengths that we have collectively? I think the next five years are going to be critical. I’m happy that the President of the Commission seems very much on board when it comes to this agenda, but it’s also now up to the Council and to the member states to support her and to make sure that some of the bold recommendations that are present in the Draghi report actually materialise, because so far the progress that we have made is clearly not sufficient.
Asked about the migration issue and Europe’s stance, Kyriakos Mitsotakis said:
I’ve been following the debate around immigration from the very beginning since we took over power in 2019. The previous government had an “open door” approach. “Everyone is welcome to Europe. It is our responsibility to save the world”. But of course, eventually, these people don’t want to stay in Greece, so it was convenient for us to actually keep our borders open because we were hoping that these people would end up somewhere else.
In my mind, it is very clear that this approach was a disaster. I think that when Germany opened its borders in 2015, it created a cascade of events with which we are still dealing.
I think it has become the consensus at the European Council that we need to protect our external borders, that borders actually matter. I think you’re right about that, that we don’t live in a world without borders and borders is what essentially defines us and what allows us at the end of the day to live together.
My obligation as a Prime Minister of Greece is to protect the Greek border, which happens to be also the European border, and to do my best in order to ensure that people don’t enter Greece illegally and this is exactly what I’m doing. I’m unapologetic about that. I’ve been unapologetic from the very beginning, whether it’s our sea border or our land border. Initially, in 2020, when we started this policy, with the sorts of things that were said about us -and I consider myself a liberal, center-right politician-, by the radical left in Europe or by the so-called “progressive” media, was extremely harsh.
But there is an understanding now that we cannot manage the migration problem unless we at least restrict the number of people who come, make it more difficult for people to come to Europe, because it will never be impossible for people to come to Europe. You can never completely create a “European fortress”. But you can send a signal to these desperate people: don’t spend your money, don’t give your money to smugglers, because at the end of the day, it’s the smuggler business model that we’re trying to break.
Of course, this is not an easy task. It’s a day-to-day difficult job. We need to work with transit countries. For example, in our case, we need to work with Turkey. We try to do our best. Our cooperation has improved, but we still have some way to go when it comes to managing migration.
At the same time that this is happening, we need to recognise that Europe is faced with a big demographic challenge. We want to promote family-friendly policies. We need to increase labour force participation because even in Greece, which is a country which still has higher unemployment than the rest of Europe, we are faced with labour shortages.
There are various ways of addressing this problem. For example, one policy which has proven to be extremely successful is we now allow pensioners to work without any cut in their pension, which was what was happening before. We realised that we actually have a lot of people who still want to work, and they actually fill jobs which other people are not willing to take. We need to increase the participation of women in the workforce. We need to increase the participation of handicapped people in the workforce. At the same time, there are jobs which we will have difficulties finding Greeks to do, for example, agricultural jobs, construction jobs.
The answer there is you have to do bilateral agreements with countries to offer people the long-term prospect to work in Greece, but you have to do it in a managed and in a controlled manner. We need to determine who can come to Greece or who can come to Europe. This should not be determined by the smugglers because this is exactly what happens. Of course, issues of integration are important. Integration policies are difficult. There have been successful examples, and there have been clearly unsuccessful examples.And I’m sure you can talk about that given the experience in France.
Let me give you an example we don’t talk a lot about, but which has been very, very successful in Greece. The story of Albanians moving to Greece during the ’90s. These people came to Greece. Some of them were actually Greeks living in Albania. Others were Albanians who came in search of jobs. They ended up staying in Greece. Their kids were born in Greece. Their kids go to a Greek school, and they’re Greeks. Basically, they contributed to the growth of the economy. Basically, there are always exceptions, but they were relatively well assimilated into Greek society.
But of course, there are also other cases where we have to recognise in principle that people who are culturally completely different from us, even if we try very hard, we will have difficulties making them part of a society which, in the case of Greece, is still relatively homogeneous.
So, the answer in one sentence is we need a big “fence”, but we also need a big enough “door” to allow people that we actually want to come to Europe, and we need to balance between the two. This, at least, is what Greece has been trying to do.
On the situation in the Middle East and relations between Greece and Israel, the Prime Minister noted:
Let me start by saying that Greece has a strategic partnership with Israel, and that what happened on October 7th was truly, truly horrible. And Israel, in principle, had a right to defend itself. The flip side of the coin is that what has happened in Gaza, and what is still happening in Gaza, in my mind, is inexcusable in terms of the loss of innocent human lives. And it is a strategy that, to me, seems to meet no clear military target, because I’m always very concerned when I don’t see the endgame of a military intervention.
Of course, we’re all very much concerned about a possible escalation of the war. It has, to a certain extent, happened already in Lebanon. I do recognise that Iran is truly an existential threat for Israel. Israel has a right to address this threat. In my mind, there is a distinction between what is happening in Gaza and what may be happening in Israel’s attempt to fight other proxy militias, in particular Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.
At the end of the day, there is no other solution but for two people to share the same land. It may seem very difficult to get to that point right now, but I fundamentally believe that it is in the long term interest of Israel to accept that this will be the end state of what needs to happen in this part of the world.
I think there are many Israelis who accept this as a fundamental premise. The problem is that every day that passes, this, what we call a two-state solution, seems more and more complicated, not just because of what is happening in Gaza, but also because of what is happening in the West Bank, where the presence of violent settlers in violation of international law risks a fait accompli that is already very, very difficult to reverse.
Of course, one needs to take into consideration the US approach, the new US approach towards Israel and what may that mean towards a possible solution.
For me, the first priority is to really stop military activities in Gaza, but also in southern Lebanon, but in particular in Gaza, where I simply see no other military goal that needs to be achieved. After all, the top leadership of Hamas has been eliminated. I was hoping that with the killing of Sinwar, that would give Israel a good reason to stop. Unfortunately, it hasn’t happened.
Referring to the war in Ukraine and the prospects for peace, Kyriakos Mitsotakis underlined:
Any possible peace between Russia and Ukraine cannot be the result of Ukrainian capitulation. Of course, speaking about a Ukrainian victory may sound too optimistic, but it is very, very clear that at least we need to give Ukraine the possibility to defend itself and not to lose more territory. If one wants to be realistic, this is exactly what we’re trying to achieve right now.
Of course, I’m not so sure that the claims by the US leadership that a deal can be done in 24 hours will actually materialise, because I think that President-elect Trump, soon President Trump, will also be wary of a possible deal that will result in Russia presenting this as a victory. Because a victory for Russia is also a victory for China and for North Korea, which has actually sent troops to Ukraine. I think in the framework of the new great rivalry between the US and China, I’m not sure that this is an outcome that will necessarily be acceptable to the new US President.
Right now, our obligation has always been to help Ukraine defend itself. Of course, we can provide material support, we have all done so, but providing soldiers is obviously something which is out of the question.
To end the discussion on a more positive note, let us think how things looked for Ukraine one day after the Russians decided to invade. It was almost a given that they would be in Kyiv in a couple of days, that they would probably occupy a big chunk of Ukraine, and that they would install a puppet regime. None of this has happened.
Ukraine remained solidly pro-western with a strong defence industry that will allow it to defend itself, hopefully once a peace has been agreed and with a regime that clearly is not a Russian puppet regime. If you think what Putin’s expectations were when he attacked, one could argue, yes, he has gained territory beyond what he was already indirectly controlling, but he has not achieved his main goals, and he must not achieve these goals.
We, at least in Europe, remain very much committed in the short term to ensure that things on the battleground, at least, don’t get worse.
Asked to give an optimistic message for our times, the Prime Minister said:
I’m a big student of history, and sometimes it’s worthwhile thinking about the challenges that the previous generations actually faced. At the time, I’m sure they seemed momentous, but they found a way to overcome them and build a better future for the next generations. I’m also a firm believer that this is an inflection point for Europe, and that we will understand that the circumstances no longer allow us to be complacent. I’m sure that this reality is sinking in also in the big European countries.
We certainly need to understand that only if we are united, will we be able to leverage our strength in a world that is so rapidly changing. But I think the note of optimism is that we still live in a place that is the envy of the world. Somehow, you land in any European capital and you know you’re in Europe. I mean, if you were to land in the US or in any other place, you would understand that you’re not in Europe.
We have a rich tradition of overcoming difficulties in our continent. After all, we went through two world wars, and previous generations managed to build a better future. Let’s look at history as a guide and allow us to be cautiously optimistic.
