Thank you, Mr. Speaker, for your kindness. I will be brief.
First, I will address my remarks to Mr. Katrinis, representing today the President of PASOK. Mr. Katrinis, you know how much favorably I think of you on a personal level and you are aware of my efforts to always brief you and your party on what is happening.
You will allow me, however, to tell you that I cannot allow you the kind of remarks that you just made and I cannot allow you the expressions in your first intervention, which I tried to forgive.
I understand your need to leave a mark. I understand the difficulty of representing an absent leader, but that cannot serve as an excuse for everything.
Let me take things in order. In your first intervention you accused the government of a fiasco, referring to my visit to Moscow, my meeting with Mr. Lavrov.
You should provide at least some evidence to substantiate this fiasco. And you should at least tell us, if you judged then that the visit, which was announced, would end in a fiasco, why didn’t you say so before it took place, why didn’t you say so after it had taken place?
Instead, you come to Parliament now to say it, weeks after the visit. If you regard as a fiasco the fact that I went to Moscow and I met with Mr. Lavrov, I imagine you would say the same thing about President Macron, about Mr. Tony Blinken, you would say the same about Mr. Le Drian.
And now you refer to the statement following the visit which you have just read to us. I ask you this: What do you accuse the Greek Government of? That it did not precisely predict the invasion of Russia in Ukraine?
Is this why you read it to us and then you pointed at me, asking that I or the Prime Minister should measure ourselves against Eleftherios Venizelos?
Is that what you told us? That we have not risen to the historical stature of Eleftherios Venizelos? If you asked me this, I would acknowledge it immediately.
But I ask you, since you were quite diligent, did you pay attention to the Announcement by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, issued days before the statement that you read, in which I asked Greek citizens to leave Ukraine?
Did you see the announcement by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, also following the visit, in which we once more asked Greek citizens to leave Ukraine?
And in any case, Mr. Katrinis, since you had foreseen all this with such clarity, with such certainty, with such precision and with such insight, why did you not share it with us? Instead, you waited until seven days after the invasion to tell us?
I would like to tell you one more thing, which is more serious than all the previous ones, which I chose to leave unanswered in your first intervention, but I saw that you repeated it.
If you will allow me, as regards serious national issues, such as the reply to Turkish letters, to the Turkish letter, to be precise, which remains unanswered, do not give way to the temptation of petty partisanship and attribute negligence to the government. We are not talking about filing a lawsuit in a Court of First Instance here. You ought to realize that whenever there is a delay, this delay serves a national purpose.
And if you require more information, I never refused to provide it to you. And if you want to know what's going on, I never refused to brief your party. But it is childish, to say the least, to come here and start talking about negligence and so on.
If you allow me, Mr. Leader of the Main Opposition party, since you did me the honour of mentioning my name, it is true that you did not say anything like that but there was a relevant statement by SYRIZA about it.
And thank you for saying very clearly that if there was a disagreement between the Prime Minister and the Minister of Foreign Affairs, then, most certainly, the Prime Minister would have dismissed me. Most certainly we would not be sitting next to each other during this debate with him tolerating me and me covering for something with which I completely disagree.
It is evident, then, that politically motivated media reports, announcements and so on about a disagreement of mine with the Prime Minister, are completely devoid of any seriousness. Thank you very much.
March 1, 2022