ND Parliamentary Representative Kyriakos Mitsotakis will not vote for the leftist SYRIZA’s presidential candidate, Prokopis Pavlopoulos, regardless of the fact that the latter hails from his own conservative party.

Pavlopoulos was a former high-ranking ND minister in several governments.

Mitsotakis, himself a former minister and the son of ex-PM Constantinos Mitsotakis, gave three reasons for his “thumbs down” of Pavlopoulos.

Firstly, he said Pavlopoulos failed to stem the tide of a mushrooming “clientist state”, while he pointed to Pavlopoulos’ inadequate leadership as a relevant interior minister during the December 2008 riots in Greece. Finally, Mitsotakis said the presidential nominee has never expressed a clear position of Greece within a united Europe.