Achilleas Youth – the new youth wing of AHEPA Australasia – interviewed the Hon. Dora Bakoyannis, current MP for Athens District A, on the topic of the Greek sovereign debt crisis.
President of Achilleas Youth, Jiannis Tsaousis, asked Mrs Bakoyannis what lead Greece to its current situation at “the edge of abyss”; why liberalism has traditionally been strongly unpopular in Greece; the path of real reform needed for Greece to realise long-term prosperity; the decay of the modern Greek state and how the diaspora can help its motherland in extreme times of need as those Hellenes traverse today.
The former Foreign Minister of Greece (2006-09), Minister for Culture (1992-93), Lord Mayor of Athens (2003-06) and World Mayor 2005 noted the “political price” she has paid for pushing for real reforms in Greece in 2010 by voting for the May 2010 IMF/EU/ECB bailout, as she was sacked by the New Democracy party and only welcomed back in June 2012.
Furthermore, the former Foreign Minister and prominent Greek liberal said “we must demolish” the Greek state as it is known, which she believes was built on hollow foundations from the start, after the fall of the junta in 1974 and especially after 1981 when the first PASOK government was elected.
In reference to the IMF’s recent change of tact towards Greece, as Christine Lagarde, the IMF’s Managing Director has begun to openly promote a two-year extension to Greece’s bailout terms, Mrs Bakoyannis says that she has been “warning these troika gentlemen” of the consequences of the horizontal cuts asked for, in pushing for real, structural reform in Greece.
Importantly, Mrs Bakoyannis said that investors will never lose out from Greece,
Mrs Bakoyannis affirmed to Achilleas Youth that she is in Greek politics for the long run to remake the Greek state and society.