Greece’s prime minister sacked the country’s agriculture minister Monday after video surfaced of him laughing approvingly as a local party official expounded on how compensation payments for natural disasters can help win elections.
A government statement said Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis spoke to the minister, Spilios Livanos, to demand an explanation over his reaction to the “unacceptable reference.”
The statement said Livanos “admitted that he should have reacted differently” and offered his resignation, which was accepted.
The video was from a meeting Livanos attended last week in Sparta in southern Greece. In it the mayor, himself a former cabinet official when Mitsotakis’ conservative New Democracy party was in government in 2004-2009, is heard saying that the party was able to win the 2007 election against the odds “by taking bags (of money) to compensate” people afflicted by wildfires that had ravaged southern Greece weeks earlier, killing scores of people.
Livanos appeared in the video to laugh and say it would be hard to match that “epic achievement.” During his visit to Sparta, he had announced compensation payments to farmers who suffered crop damage from frost.
The governing party also expelled the mayor, Petros Doukas, from its ranks, saying his remarks “as well as being historically inaccurate, have nothing to do with New Democracy’s principles and values.”
Deputy Digital Governance Minister Giorgos Georgantas will be the new Rural Development and Food minister, following the resignation of Spilios Livanos.
Georgantas (54), a New Democracy MP from Kilkis, will be sworn in at 1.30 p.m. on Tuesday (local time) in the presence of President Katerina Sakellaropoulou.
Source: ABC, Kathimerini
