The motion of censure against the government tabled by SYRIZA-Progressive Alliance led by former Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras was rejected in the Greek Parliament on Sunday, with 156 MPs voting against, 142 voting in favour and one declaring present.
Of the 300 MPs, 299 were present as New Democracy's MP Marietta Giannakou was hospitalised following a fall.
Addressing the Greek Prime Minister before the vote, Alexis Tsipras accused him of acting "as though you believe your own propaganda," while adding that the citizens were now "immune to it". He accused the prime minister of "living in glass bubble" protected by "flatterers".
"It is time someone told you what is really happening in Greek society. Mr. Mitsotakis, you are finished politically but the worst thing is that you are living in your own parallel universe where everything is going well, because it is presented as going well by the mainstream media," Tsipras said.
"You are finished, not only because you failed with huge human, economic and social cost in nearly all the crucial issues you handled. In the pandemic, the fires, high prices, the recent snow...but chiefly because at a time when you are failing resoundingly in everything...you continue in a provocative way to believe that you are not a prime minister who must be held accountable but a prince for whom power is a hereditary right."
In response, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said the censure motion tabled by SYRIZA-Progressive Alliance was a "desperate attempt" by the main opposition leader to "staunch wounds within his own party,"
"You have announced, Mr. Tsipras, that I am finished politically. I imagine this forecast is as accurate as when you said that there was not a chance in a million that Mitsotakis will win the elections," the prime minister said.
He accused Tsipras of "doing what he knows how to do well, distorting the truth," while adding that the main opposition leader had outdone himself during his speech in parliament, "[with] two lies in every sentence."
Responding to the main opposition's call for early elections, Mitsotakis said that SYRIZA had not yet examined any of the mistakes of its government nor changed any members of the leadership team that the Greek people had rejected at the last elections.
The New Democracy government, he added, was facing the challenges of tomorrow and crises without recent historic precedent, such as the global pandemic, the secondary energy crisis, extreme weather phenomena, earthquakes, heat waves and the "hybrid attack on our country in Evros and the events in the Eastern Mediterranean."
"We can say that we managed to get through these storms with the least casualties," the prime minister said.
"We make the lessons priorities and we serve them...not on the basis of the cries of a party that has nothing to say about the responsibility of a private company," he added.
