In his first interview after his victory in the May 21 elections, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis spoke to CNN about the increase in his party’s percentages and the absolute number of votes saying that he had defeated the populists’ ideas.

Responding to a related question from Christiane Amanpour, Mitsotakis pointed out that in these elections it appeared that the fantasies and promises of easy solutions were defeated, stressing that New Democracy not only increased its percentages but also in absolute numbers the votes it received but got twice the percentage of the official opposition.

Talking about the economy, he said that the goal of the next government is to maintain high growth rates in order to create more and better jobs for everyone, which is why, as he said, it is important that the New Democracy party has a strong and independent government after the new elections.

“I am very happy about the election victory,” he said. And he continued: “We must understand how painful the crisis was for all Greeks. The economy is growing faster than any other in the EU, we have increased our exports and are investing in our innovation. We have many comparative advantages and I am sure that the Greeks will trust us again. Our priority is to raise wages. The cost of living has skyrocketed. All this while reducing the public debt. If we look at the way things are moving, we have not reached the investment stage and hopefully, we will have a strong government, we will achieve that.”

“I believe we will have a strong government to continue our reform work and attract investments. We have made Greece an attractive investment destination and I intend to continue on this path if the citizens trust us again. The goal is to increase wages. We want to increase disposable income but not mortgage our future.”

On the priorities of the new administration, he said: “In the new four years we must have more jobs, more growth, and a modern agenda in health and education and further reduce inequalities as we did in the previous two years. We have done amazing things in the digitization of the state, but we need to do a lot for the hard core of the state. We defeated the populist opposition for the second time in a row. Fantasies of easy solutions, were defeated. If you provide solutions to citizens, they reward you. We won more votes, we increased our percentages.”