Continuing his tour ahead of the European Parliament elections, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said he turned New Democracy’s Monday censure motion to a confidence vote, speaking in the city of Xanthi in northern Greece on Monday evening, and added that the party’s leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis did not file the motion “out of a crisis of morality”. 
After all, said Tsipras, Mitsotakis “covered New Democracy deputy Nikos Georgiadis over the allegations of paedophilia against him.”
The financial scandals of Siemens, Novartis and off-shore accounts “will keep company to Mitsotakis,” added Tsipras, and highlighted that when the time comes to discuss the confidence vote in parliament “we will talk about our new ecomomic policy and announce permanent anti-austerity relief counter-measures.”   
When SYRIZA is elected to govern the country for another four-year term, it will “distribute to the Greek people a potential, not burdens,” said Tsipras. 
Talking about works that were undertaken in the Xanthi prefecture in the years 2015 to 2019, he said more than 37.6 million euros was approved from EU regional funds in the region, “an amount 14 times greater than the 2.6 million euros spent during 2010-2015. 
Among other successes, he mentioned how his government scrapped compulsory Shariah (Islamic law) for Muslim minorities in Greece, by providing a choice for litigants to pursue civil cases in the national court system, of particular importance to women’s rights. 
“We are reviewing, for the first time, the legislative framework of Law 1920/1991, which is outdated and needs to be replaced by a process of electing muftis (Muslim religious leaders) from among religious leaders of the minority, thus ensuring their widest possible acceptance by the Muslim minority, said the prime minister.
Tsipras said he does not want the return of the “old political system, which does not wish to change anything,” and that SYRIZA may have had a drawback in 2015, referring to the government’s compromise on austerity policies, “but we did not become slaves to the old regime.”
The Greek premier said that “there’s yet struggles ahead, but we are like fish in the pond,” as Syriza and the governnment are suppoted by the Greek people, not by oligarchs and the media. “We do not answer to any of the elites and the bankers,” he noted. 
“The next few days will show that we have made justice a reality,” he concluded.