The Minister of Education, Kyriakos Pierrakakis, speaking to SKAI, commented on private universities, the Sorbonne, the Public Onassis Schools, as well as on the Tempi and the accusations of the opposition parties about the death of Vassilis Kalogeros.

“First of all, we are talking about the loss of a young man and I want to express my sincere condolences to his family and his relatives,” the minister said, describing yesterday as a “dark day” for the Greek Parliament and the Hellenic Republic.

“Absolutely vile and insane what the Opposition said in Parliament”

“I listened very carefully to what the Opposition said and I think what they said was absolutely vulgar. And they are vulgar regardless of who is governing, regardless of who is in opposition. It is not possible for the opposition to imply that a government can associate its practice and operation with the loss of a young child. These things are crazy and there is an Opposition that flirts with the crazy and the absurd and flatters it. This thing is not only blatant and unacceptable, it is dangerous. It is undermining the way democracy works,” he said, adding:

“I heard Mr Velopoulos, Mr Androulakis and Mr Famelos say the same thing, that they don’t trust the judiciary. They didn’t say ‘we want to see some changes in the way justice works’. So what? What is the logical implication? To take the law into one’s own hands? Have the law of the jungle apply? What do they want? How do they imagine a European country of 2025 to work and where does that lead? The darkest pages of the Greek Democracy in its 50 years were the pages where some opposition parties and some politicians came to invest in human suffering and toxicity and reproduce it. Did that work out well for the country? We turned a page. As far as we are concerned, we will not tolerate any insinuation.”

At the same time, he noted that the Tempi tragedy left a “bleeding wound that must be closed and we will do our best to close it. I will not judge either the evidence that supports the claim that there was flammable material on the train or that which undermines that claim. I will wait for justice. That’s what you do in a European country: you trust justice, unlike those who don’t, and you wait to see where it will end up. Our job, the government’s job, is to make sure that what happened doesn’t happen again.”

Regarding the establishment of non-state universities and the arrival of the Sorbonne in Greece, Pierrakakis commented that “I knew that in politics there was character assassination, PASOK what PASOK taught us is that there is also character assassination of universities.”

“Whether it is or not Sorbonne, get someone from the control room to go on the university’s website. This institution put out an announcement yesterday that it is among the 4.4% of the world’s best universities, making it one of the 13 universities that succeeded the Sorbonne in 1970 with a 50-year history. These people said they will come to Greece and make an investment of 25 million euros and at campus level for the next 5 years. Whether it is good or not will be seen by the relevant Independent Authority. It sounds good to me that a university like this wants to come to my country.”

At the same time, he accused PASOK of “vertigo” on this issue. “In Parliament when we were passing the law on non-state universities, they were in favour of non-state universities, but not these non-state universities. Then we opened the issue of IB, the International Baccalaureate. The PASOK sector issued a statement that they were against the IB, I went to Parliament and reminded them that the provision for the International Baccalaureate had been passed by George Papandreou as Minister of Education in the government of Andreas Papandreou.“