The Prime Minister participated in a conversation with Connie Loizos, Managing Director and Editor-in-Chief of the online newspaper TechCrunch, in the context of an event organized by Endeavor Greece titled “The Future of AI Elsewhere” in San Francisco.
The Prime Minister’s conversation with Connie Loizos follows:
Connie Loizos: It’s such a pleasure to get to see you again. So somebody had told me, and I don’t know if this is true, that you are the first sitting Prime Minister to visit the Bay Area in a, I guess, semi-official capacity since your father came in the ’90s when you were a Stanford student. Is that correct?
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: My father actually did not make it to California. He was planning to attend, he was Prime Minister, he was planning to attend my commencement back in 1993, but he couldn’t make it because things got very heated back in Greece. So my mother was just the one who came. So as far as I know, I must be the first sitting Prime Minister to visit California. But for me, it feels like a homecoming because I have the best of memories from my time at Stanford.
Lenny, we met – we shouldn’t say this, huh? We were so young- 33 years ago. And I remember at the time, I was actually probably the only social scientist amongst a group of engineers. I don’t know if that has changed dramatically since. I know Stanford is making a big effort not to be perceived just as an engineering school.
For me, this is a very, very important trip for many reasons. An opportunity to connect with this amazing community of Greeks who are active in the tech space. It’s also a fact-finding and a learning sort of trip for me. I had an opportunity to visit some of the leading tech companies this morning to really get a firsthand experience of what is actually happening at the forefront of technological change. Because as you can imagine, AI seems to be the topic of the moment.
I’m heading to the UN tomorrow, and I’m sure that world leaders, as they make their speeches to this global assembly, will speak about AI, the tremendous opportunities, but also the challenges it poses. So thank you all for showing up. This is an amazing gathering. And thank you also to Endeavor. Thank you to Costanza. Thank you to Panagiotis. They’ve done such an amazing job in terms of building bridges between the tech community, not just in California but abroad and Greece. And this is one of the purposes also of this trip.
Connie Loizos: Absolutely. I cannot say enough wonderful things about the Endeavor team. Just wondering, are you going to have time to visit your old stomping grounds at Stanford?
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: I’m going back tomorrow, for an event at the Hoover Institute, quite excited about that.
Connie Loizos: Well, I was going to say, they’ve graduated and not graduated so many world leaders, but I don’t think that they’ve graduated that many Prime Ministers. So I’m sure they’re very happy to have you as an alumnus. So can you tell us what brings you to the Bay Area?
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: Well, as I said, I think this is an opportunity to really try to connect with the very substantial Greek community that lives in the Bay Area that is active in the tech space. And I think also to make the case about how Greece has changed over the past years.
Yes, we focus a lot on the economic transformation, and I’m very happy about the fact that Greece is no longer perceived as sort of the black sheep of Europe. We now have an economy that is growing much faster than the eurozone average. At the same time, we’re bringing down our debt at a very, very fast rate. I don’t know if I should say this, but we are borrowing at a significantly lower interest rate than the United States. Maybe this is a testimony to the success of the Greek economy.
But something else has also happened in Greece over the past years which I think is remarkable, and it is the emergence of a booming ecosystem of technology companies.
I see so many young kids who, maybe a generation ago, even 10, 15 years ago, were simply aspiring to get a job in the public sector, banging on our doors as MPs asking for some sort of salary jobs. And now I see this young generation of entrepreneurs who are really eager to build their own companies and are doing amazing things. And you will hear after our interaction from some of the most successful Greek entrepreneurs. And it is truly incredible what has happened in the tech ecosystem.
So for me, this is an opportunity to see what sort of bridges we can build to explain in more detail what is happening in Greece, but also to talk a little bit about our strategy when it comes to AI and what the opportunities are for people to look at Greece, either to establish a presence there, establish a research center there, look at Greece as a country that could find itself on really on the pioneering front of how we use AI to improve government services, which is something I care deeply about. But also, again, as I said, an opportunity for me and my team to learn from people who are active here and to sort of bring back all these lessons to Greece.
Connie Loizos: Well, I’m sure a lot of people here obviously love the country, are invested in its future. I think, just to give us a sense of what’s happening, Greece is at a turning point right now. For example, the EU’s recovery funds that were coming to Greece are coming to an end. I wonder what that means for the business community in Greece.
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: Well, first of all, I should point out for those of you who are not that knowledgeable about Greece that yes, indeed, Greece did benefit over the past 5 years from a significant influx of EU funds. This was a facility that was created after COVID to make sure that we support our economies to recover from what was indeed a massive shock. Greece benefited to the tune of €36 billion, which is a significant sum of money that was invested in Greece. But it was also invested in critical sectors such as the green transition and technology.
So we used a lot of these funds to support our digital transformation. Just to give you two examples, I’m sure most in the audience are aware of our gov.gr site. This simply did not exist seven years ago. If you wanted to interact with the Greek bureaucracy, you did have to spend a lot of time waiting in lines to get a simple certificate. This is all history today, and a lot of this constant digital transformation has been funded through the EU Resilience Fund.
A second example is part of our AI infrastructure. We now have a new supercomputer, a very powerful computer that is coming online in Lavrio in a couple of months from now, that again will provide significant computing backbone power not just for the Greek state, but also for Greek startups. This again was funded by EU funds.
So for us, it was a question of really using these funds, not just to support Greek society during a difficult time after COVID, but also to drive a profound transformation of the economy. I don’t want Greece just to be known as a country that is a top tourist destination.
Yes, my aspiration is to make Greece the number one tourist destination in the world, and we have the capacity to actually do that. But I also want Greece to be known as an innovative, extrovert country that is able to attract foreign direct investment, but also export know-how to Europe and the rest of the world. And I think we are seeing very good indications that we are on a positive track.
If I just look at the number of VC investments that were made in Greece last year, the number of VC funds that are active in Greece, the number of foreign funds that are looking to invest in Greece, it’s clear that something is changing in the country. And it’s an opportunity to really make sure that we all benefit from this transformation.
Connie Loizos: Absolutely. Well, I went to the Panathena Festival this summer. I was blown away by how much the team had accomplished on that front as well.
I did want to ask you a little bit about the beginnings of a sovereign wealth fund. So you’ve had this fund that was also sort of a crisis-era fund that manages something like $13 billion. It’s got stakes in real estate, energy, water facilities, but you want to turn it into more of a development fund.
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: Yeah, this was during the difficult years when Greece had to go through its own financial troubles, a lot of the state assets were put into this one fund. And again, the idea was that it could almost serve as collateral to ensure that we will repay our future debt obligations. That is no longer a concern because Greece right now is repaying its debt at a faster rate than any OECD country in the history of the OECD.
So I think we’ve convinced the capital markets that we are capable of repaying our debts. You know, we run primary surpluses. So now we have to think, we have to think constructively, what are we going to do with these valuable assets and how we can actually build a sovereign wealth fund that can invest strategically in areas where maybe the market would not be willing to invest because, again, the returns would be longer term.
So we’re at the beginning of this process of ensuring that these assets will be put to good use. But we have an excellent team that is in place. And again, the purpose here is not to crowd out the private market.
My intention is not to create another sort of state-sponsored VC company. We have enough proficient investors in Greece and enough startups to be able to attract the capital that they need to grow.
It’s the sort of other investments that we can make which could possibly not attract necessarily the attention of the private capital markets, but which would clearly serve the country well if we pursue such a strategy.
Connie Loizos: Interesting. Well, I guess if you had your druthers, would that fund or would there be a fund in Greece that could invest in Greeks in California?
I mean, it feels like we’ve talked a little bit last year about the diaspora and all the talent that’s come and gone and it’s coming back. But just to sort of accelerate that movement back, I just wonder if that’s something that’s on the table or is possible.
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: Oh, I think there’s enough, probably enough venture capital in California to be able to support good ideas again. What’s happening in the Bay Area, as far as I know, has not really replicated anywhere in the world, but it is about creating ecosystems, and for me, it’s about creating bridges.
It’s about explaining to people, and they don’t necessarily have to be Greeks, what is happening in Greece. It’s about making people aware of the fact that we have an excellent public education system that is producing great numbers of STEM graduates who could be hired at wages which would still be significantly lower than those that you would get in the US.
It’s about telling founders, and not necessarily Greek founders, “come to Greece, establish your teams there”. It’s about telling the tech community that, hey, we have an AI strategy in Greece and we do intend to develop areas of expertise in verticals that would be of great interest to us: healthcare, for example, education, civil protection, defense.
If I just look at what’s happening in the defense space in Greece, we’ve been spending so much money on defense over the past 30 years, but we don’t have much to show in terms of a domestic defense industry.
So look what’s happening. And I know numerous companies that are active in defense, young companies. We now have a framework where we can actually assess their products and services. It’s easy for us within the billions and billions we spend on defense to allocate a small sum to experiment essentially with new technological ideas. And if these ideas are successful, then these companies can go sell their products abroad because they will have a seal of approval by the Greek Ministry of Defense.
So it’s really about making sure that we pitch Greece as an attractive destination to business. We have plenty of incentives, especially for those Greeks who want to return to Greece in terms of paying lower taxes for 7 years. And we also have lots of foreign companies that are setting up facilities in Greece and are actively looking to recruit people from abroad.
One of the biggest problems we faced during the crisis, and I know this will resonate with many people in the audience, was the fact that young Greeks left the country simply because there were no opportunities. So it was a migration not necessarily by choice, but by necessity.
Over the past years, we’ve been able to reverse this brain drain and people are coming back to Greece. I mean, I visited Tesla today and Tesla has an amazing team in Greece doing very, very advanced research on magnetic properties of materials. And they’ve actually been able to recruit Greeks from abroad to actually work in Greece.
So imagine if you’re someone who’s considering returning to Greece, if you could work for a cutting-edge company out of Greece, it seems to me to be able to combine the best of both worlds. You can be in Greece, live in Greece, be with your family, enjoy the amazing quality of life, but at the same time also work for a global leader when it comes to technology.
So for me, these trips also serve the purpose of really trying to make people comfortable with doing business in Greece. Sometimes, we can surprise people pleasantly.
One of the things we’ve done -this is not so relevant to this audience- was to change the legal framework to attract hedge funds to Greece. Suddenly, some of the big hedge funds, some of them started leaving the UK and coming to Greece simply because it makes more sense financially for them to be in Greece.
But if a hedge fund like a tech company comes to Greece, they will hire top people. They will start creating their own ecosystem. And this is, at the end of the day, it’s all about good jobs. It’s about productivity enhancement, enhancing investments. And it’s about offering young Greeks opportunities to, if they, should they choose to stay because I know this is a global market and many people- I want people to come, leave Greece by choice, not by necessity.
Of course, I chose to leave Greece to study 40 years ago and I chose to return, but I never want to find my country again in a position where young Greeks will actually leave the country simply because there are no jobs.
Connie Loizos: Well, there’s so many external signals that you’re accomplishing what you want to accomplish, including, I think, this global index started by a US company, MSCI, which is changing Greece’s status from emerging to..
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: Developed.
Connie Loizos: Developed. So what should the audience here take from that? What does that..
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: Well, I think it’s another indication that the economy is doing well and that Greece is no longer treated as a special case. Look, if you look at the global market now, there’s tremendous turbulence in the global bond market. Why is this happening? Because investors realize that governments in many countries, including the US, are running big deficits and they are concerned and they demand a higher risk premium in order to borrow to those countries.
Greece right now is the exception. So we knew that none of this would make sense unless we were able to put the fundamentals in place. For a country that still has a significant debt overhang, my number one obligation is when I see these next generation, these young Greeks, is to ensure that we’re not going to inherit to them the same debt that the previous generation inherited to us.
We had two recent upgrades by leading rating agencies, unheard of in this context. Everybody’s debt seems to be downgraded. So all these are positive signals that sort of create a positive momentum, especially at a time when people are concerned about, you know, especially the state of Europe as a whole.
Greece is going against the trend. This is also, I think, related to the politics in Greece. You see the rest of European countries, extreme forces getting stronger and stronger. Look what’s happening in Germany, for example, a party that has neo-Nazi roots is winning elections. You have the radical right, the radical left and what’s left of the political center.
Well, in Greece, we’re going against this trend. I have the privilege of leading a moderate center-right liberal party, and we’re still way ahead in the polls. We have a good chance of winning the next elections.
By the way, for those of you who live here, you know you can actually now vote by mail. You don’t have to go to the Consulate. For those of you who want to vote, and I encourage you, for those of you who don’t want to return to Greece, just register. The platform is already open, but it’s another indication of how we view the engagement with the diaspora. I mean, this is such a great power for Greece, and we’ve never actually been able to make it work to the benefit of the country.
I’m so happy with these events because for the first time, I do get a sense when the diaspora is looking at Greece, it’s not just about, you know, sometimes, people want to do business in Greece. They come to Greece, they have a lovely dinner under the Acropolis. This is the most beautiful country in the world. Then they start doing business and they say, “well, maybe this is not the place we actually want to do business”. Well, this is actually changing. So ease of doing business in Greece, you know, ease of setting up companies, hiring people, all this is moving in the right direction. There’s still a lot of work to be done, but I think it’s worthwhile taking a moment to acknowledge where we were and where we are right now.
Connie Loizos: Absolutely. Well, I wonder, too, for people in the audience who are here, have companies, want to make investments, what is the sort of window now from, you know, setting up a company in Greece to payroll? I mean, how sort of expedited is that process?
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: I think that setting up a company is something that can happen very, very quickly. I mean, labor laws have been made more flexible. Even things which are very important to the tech community… One of the first things we did was to change the way we tax stock options, for example. And these are very important. They may sound technical to many, but they are very, very important if you want to set up a company that actually rewards its employees with equity. I think the basics are basically in place, and that’s why I think you see an explosion of companies being set up in Greece.
For me, the most important aspect is really changing the mentality. If you go to our public universities, they’re open to speak to companies and to create spinouts.
For those of you who studied in Greece maybe 10 or 20 years ago, that was not the case. It was a very radical leftist approach. “We don’t want companies in universities. Capital is bad, entrepreneurship is horrible.” So it does take time to change these attitudes. But I’m thrilled every time I go to high schools and I see entrepreneurship competitions and you see these kids working in teams to develop their ideas, or I go to the schools where we’ve sent robotics kits to almost all schools, and sometimes you have High school kids building little satellites.
Greece is present in space now. We’ll be sending our first astronaut to space in a year from now. Who would have thought that this was possible? We’re building satellites in Greece. All these are firsts for us, but the most important thing is, again, that we give the opportunities to those technically-minded young Greeks, those entrepreneurs, to actually do business in their own country.
And when it comes to AI, to also have a government that actually understands what it’s all about and that is actually willing to experiment and work with companies in a nimble way to improve our services. Because for us, this is a great opportunity. Konstantinos gave a very interesting speech about the benefits of AI in the long term.
But, you know, I look at a bureaucracy where a lot of processes can be really easily automated. I look at justice, for example, in Greece, and it takes for ages, judges spend hours and hours reading through decisions. And there’s so much paperwork. And so these are still things that AI can do very, very well and that also don’t really raise any particular ethical questions. So these are the obvious things, nuts and bolts, where you can actually use AI to improve government services and government efficiency.
Or you look at healthcare, where really we have an opportunity to punch above our weight. We’re 10 million, so we’re not too big, not too small. We have, the healthcare system is very centralized and we control all the data. Plus, we’ve been launching a big sort of preventive screening program over the past years. So, we have lots of data. So what do we do with this data? How do we put in place a data management framework that protects individual data while making this data available to companies that are eager to offer AI-driven solutions? There’s a lot of value there for companies and not just – I can tell you, not just for Greek companies. Many foreign companies are looking at Greece and wanting to partner with us because they see that we’re quite nimble and we’re willing to run interesting experiments, and we are a data-driven government.
We do have, and I do want to stress this, we have with us the Minister for Digital Transformation. We actually do have a Ministry for Digital Transformation and AI, which I set up immediately in 2019 because this is sort of a horizontal policy that cuts across all departments and breaking down government silos is never easy, but we’ve been able to do it and demonstrate benefits for all ministries and all departments.
Connie Loizos: Well, I’m not surprised that foreign companies are coming in. You’ve also made it much easier. You’ve got so many different interesting initiatives, the Tech Visa, the Talent Visa, the Digital Nomad Visa. How are those initiatives? How would you rate them? How are you monitoring them?
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: I think we still have work to do when it comes to the speed with which we offer people the opportunity to work in Greece. Of course, if you’re a Greek or if you are a member of the EU, those issues are automatically addressed. But we want to encourage people to – and this is not just for Greeks – to come and not just spend their holidays in Greece, but also to work from Greece. At a time when remote work is becoming easier, we have good infrastructure. We have excellent 5G coverage in Greece, much better 5G coverage than I got on Sand Hill Road. I was very surprised.
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: I’m very surprised at the center of the tech world to realize that signal in a small remote island in Greece is much better than what you get in Palo Alto, but be that as it may, the opportunity that you could work from anywhere in Greece is really something that resonates with people.
Again, I want to make the case, it’s not just about Athens or even Thessaloniki. You look at Crete or you look at places such as Ioannina, for example, which is a city in northwestern Greece, and suddenly you have tech companies emerging there. Why? Because you have a good public university and because you have people who said, oh, I can actually work from these cities and set up companies there rather than just doing it in Athens.
Connie Loizos: Well, again, I’m just thinking about this audience and how they can support Greece, and I think you’ve got a lot of fans here. You are going up for reelection for your 3rd term, which is not unprecedented.
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: It is unprecedented.
Connie Loizos: It is unprecedented?
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: Yes. In the sense that we don’t have term limits in Greece, but the truth is that winning a 3rd term hasn’t been really done before. So we know we’re running against history here.
Connie Loizos: Amazing. Well, I was going to say, I guess just if you could sort of underscore for people or help them understand how durable these initiatives are.
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: I think the foundations have been laid, but of course, you know, it doesn’t take much in politics to derail a good initiative. So when we speak about -and I think every election should be about the future and not about the past- I try, as we enter our last year, to describe my vision for Greece in 2030. 2030 is a very interesting year for those of you who like history because we’ll be celebrating 200 years since the creation of the modern Greek state. We celebrate the revolution of 1821, but this was the beginning of the journey. The end of the journey was February 1830 when the Greek state was established.
So where do we want to see Greece on that important date? I do want to talk about the future, but I also remind people that whatever progress we have made is always fragile. If another government came into power that decides to again spend beyond our means, it wouldn’t take very long for the bond markets to turn against us, and I think it is my obligation to remind people that we’ve been on a very difficult journey, we’ve made a lot of progress, and we should be very protective of what we have achieved.
But at the end, every election is and should be about the future, and I think we have laid forward a very sort of detailed and comprehensive plan for where we want to see Greece in 4 years from now.
Again, I know every election is tough, especially if you’ve been in power for some time. You need to convince people that you have the energy, the drive, the ideas, the experience – experience matters these days – to continue to take the country forward. I hope I can do that between now and the next elections.
Connie Loizos: Well, I want to give you some time to talk about the future and AI. Obviously, as you said earlier, big topic here. You want Greece to become more of an AI and data hub. You have a relationship with Microsoft. There are grassroots opposition campaigns springing up everywhere – Europe, here, of course. I’m just wondering, how are people in Greece talking about this?
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: Well, first of all, we should be aware that this is a sensitive political topic. What I can tell you is that in Greece, we have not had any significant reaction against data centers. Microsoft is building a cluster of data centers in Athens. They were actually the first to commit significant resources to data centers some years ago. And AWS just announced a very big deal with the Public Power Corporation to construct the biggest data center that will be built in Greece in Western Macedonia.
So if you know a little bit about Greece, you will know that Western Macedonia was Greek coal country. And as we moved away from burning coal to produce electricity, people were concerned about job loss.
So actually, these initiatives are welcomed in Greece. So we don’t see a reaction. We don’t see any grassroots reactions against the infrastructure of AI, but one has to be very lucid about the real concerns regarding job displacement. This is something which is going to happen, and no government and no society is prepared for the speed with which it will happen. There will be, you know, real questions regarding the impact of AI, for example, on our children, our teenagers, on education.
I was one of the first to advocate for banning social media access to kids under 15, and we’re actually legislating it in Greece, and we’re at the forefront of European initiatives, but sometimes I feel that we’re already fighting yesterday’s battle. What does it mean for our kids to grow up with digital companions or boyfriends or girlfriends? I mean, these are things which should really give us pause to really think about what it means, as you said, to be human.
Αnd the last thing that – I mean, what Greece can really offer is a forum for debate. These are profoundly existential questions. For the first time, we have created a form of intelligence that is very quickly exceeding the capacity of the most advanced organ that evolution has ever created, which is the human brain. So this is happening. It’s already here. What does it mean to be human in this context? What are our responsibilities in terms of managing this technology, and of course the tremendous ethical ramifications of a transformative technology. I mean, if we cannot discuss these issues in Greece to bring together, you know, the technology world but also the social scientists, the philosophers, the historians, I cannot think of a better place to really have these discussions.
Connie Loizos: Absolutely. Well, I applaud you for moving forward with your social ban. There are a lot of countries that are thinking about doing it – France, Denmark- that aren’t there yet. Australia has moved forward. And I do wonder about chatbots becoming, you know, as addictive as social media and whether at some point these countries are going to sweep those into this same ban. You’re clearly thinking about that already.
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: Look, I mean, at the end of the day, when you think about what AI could do for education and could truly, truly be transformative, one of the things we’ve done is we’re running pilots with big AI companies. So we did a pilot with OpenAI on education. So we actually helped teachers manage their workflow better. So if you have an AI agent that helps you spend less time doing repetitive work, preparing your homework, that should give you more time for the classroom. So this is something which would be beneficial.
What would it mean to have a customized AI tutor to really help you based on your individual needs? As long as it doesn’t lead to complacency and as long as it doesn’t lead, you know, our children to replace the hard work of learning the basic skills of writing, for example, this could be beneficial.
But on the other hand, I know that you can get very complacent, and complacency is a human trait. So if you just ask, you know, whatever chatbot to do your homework for you, which is happening across the board, and we have difficulties distinguishing what is real and what isn’t, what is yours and what isn’t, that is clearly an issue that many educational systems are already grappling with.
Connie Loizos: And I just wanted to ask one last question. I’m sure you’re going to be talking about this at the United Nations in New York this week, but I do wonder where you fall on the spectrum of “slow it down – don’t slow it down”. That’s obviously a big topic here after Anthropic CEO issued a blog post last week saying the pace of innovation’s got to slow. And investors here said, you know, “maybe not”. The President said it’s a hoax.
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: Look, I’d say, I mean, if the people who are building the models are telling us we’re not really sure exactly what’s happening with these models and we only understand a fraction of how they – especially of how these models improve themselves. I’d say yes. I mean, we need to listen to them.
And, at the end of the day, all profound technologies are somehow subject to some form of regulation. Inevitably, the same will be true with AI. Now, what sort of regulation we will put in place, that is a very difficult question. And I don’t think anyone has a clear answer. But I’ll give you an example. If something goes wrong on a plane, you know, the FAA has the ability to ground all planes until it figures out what has gone wrong. Does this exist with AI now? The answer is clearly no.
So, and given the power of the technology, I think that eventually the pressure is going to be there to have some form of smart regulation, and a lot will depend on the US.
We speak a lot about global compacts and alliances. But at the end of the day, and I’m sorry to say this as a European, but this is a race for two. It’s the US and China. And the US, as a democracy, has the obligation to lead when it comes to smart regulation. Are we there yet? I don’t think so. My prediction, this is going to be a big political topic, not maybe not just in this electoral cycle, but I’d be very surprised if this isn’t a big topic in the presidential elections of 2028.
Connie Loizos: Okay. Wrapping up. And thank you. It’s been such a privilege to spend time with you. Just what would you like the Greek founders in the audience to sort of take away from this conversation about their ties to Greece and maybe why they should be thinking about..
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: Well, first of all, to those, you know, who I’m sure most of them have ties to Greece, and maybe I’m preaching to the converted, but I’d say especially at a time when it may be more difficult to bring talent to the US because restrictions have been put in place when it comes to work permits and visas, do look at Greece as a destination to do work, to to hire people, to even test your products and your services.
You know, on top of everything, you’re also going to have a great time coming to Greece. So it seems to be combining business with pleasure seems to be something that in Greece we do well. We focused too much on pleasure. Now we focus more on business. So I think the combination should work well.
But again, I want to remind everyone who is registered to vote in Greece that you can actually. Please do register. Please do vote. You don’t need to return to Greece. If you want to come, go to the consulate and vote, you can do that because we’re giving that physical option. But if you just want to mail in your vote, you can also do that.
We want you to participate in Greek political affairs because I do believe that for those who live abroad and they’re not part of the petty politics in Greece, they can see probably with greater clarity what’s happening in Greece and can offer us valuable insights on how we can improve.
Connie Loizos: That’s great. And mail-in voting does work.
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: It does. It’s safe. It does work.
Connie Loizos: Thank you.
