With the camera on in the meeting room of the Council of Ministers, Kyriakos Mitsotakis told his ministers – as a sign not to put down their pencils anxious only for their preparation in view of the ballot box – that “our work continues, we still have a very rich parliamentary project for 2023”.

As soon as the doors were closed, he took a step further: he asked the ministers to effectively communicate to the citizens the deeds of the New Democracy government in the context of the well-known government motto “we said it, we did it” and the … adapted slogan “we did it and we will keep on it doing”.

“We have produced work, show it”

As the Prime Minister reportedly said, “we have produced work, show it. In addition to the many things we have done, we have more…”. The Mitsotakis intervention took place at the time when the Minister of State Akis Skertsos had brought to the table the ministerial “blue files” for the whole of 2023. With the expectation, obviously, that the milestones and targets per sector for the next year will be implemented until the end with the New Democracy party in government.

In any case, the government’s programmatic planning, the so-called “unified government policy plan” with 19 separate action plans that activate each ministry, will also function as pre-election “material” to strengthen the ND’s political discourse on the way to the national elections – at the end of four years, according to Mitsotakis’ persistent utterance.

The renewed compass for the new year, as drawn up since last September with contacts between Maximos, the Government’s Coordination Secretariat and ministerial offices, includes a total of 111 legislative interventions, 121 objectives, 486 actions and 2,399 projects and actions until December 2023.

The information states that as far as the first months of 2023 are concerned, the PM’s office puts the burden primarily on milestones of the Recovery Fund, i.e. on specific initiatives that should run strictly within the timetables, such as, among others, the new judicial map but also the completion of the so-called multi-level governance (separation of responsibilities between the state, municipalities, regions, decentralized administration).

Three years of digital state

In the meantime, the last session for this year started with the proposal of Kyriakos Pierrakakis on the “three years of digital state”, a field that Mitsotakis also proposed in his statements, knowing that it is a field with strong acceptance by the citizens.

“When in the summer of 2019 I asked ‘how many electronic services are there in the end?’, practically no one knew how to answer us”, said the Prime Minister, “in the end we found 500, which were under-functioning, and today there are almost 1,500”. In addition, the bill on transplants – organ donation (Thanos Pleuris, Mina Gaga), the new audiovisual policy governance framework (Lina Mendoni, Pierrakakis), the national action plan for Mental Health (Plevris, Zoe Rapti), an issue of which, according to Mitsotakis, “must be included much more in our own public debate, so that we leave stigmas and prejudices behind us”, as well as the new Immigration Code (Notis Mitarakis), which caused discussions, given that cooperation between ministries is required.

The Prime Minister, attempting a cursory account of the legislation, pointed out that 2022 was “a record year”, with 131 laws passed.

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