Mitsotakis, Tsipras adopt consensual stance in parliamentary debate

By George Gilson

Having garnered international praise for Greece's success in significantly containing the spread of the coronavirus , Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis is stressing the concerted collective action with a focus on the timely enforcement of social distancing and extolled the owerwhelming compliance of the Greek people with strict public health guidelines including a partial lockdown

«What we did that I think was successful was to implement strict social distancing measures relatively early and this seems to have worked,» Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said in an interview with CNN'S Christiane Amanpour.

Since sweeping to power in July, 2019, on a business-friendly and reformist platform that included a restructuring of the state, the Harvard (Summa Cum Laude) and Stanford-educated scion of one Greece's strongest political families (his late father Constantine Mitsotakis was also the  centre-right leader of Greece's conservative New Democracy party)  has had to confront three major challenges and crises with varying degrees of success.

The first was the challenge of luring direct foreign investment - through a restructuring of highly inefficient state structures and of a decimated economy that exited the extreme austerity of bailout memorandums but has yet to stand firmly on it feet.

. The cost of borrowing reached a record low of less than two percent on a 10-year bond issue but investment remains slow

The second was the challenge of beating off with strong EU support a Turkish push to send hundreds of thousands through Greece to other EU countries. However he abolished the migration ministry only to reinstitute it months later after thousands of migrants crossed to Greece from the Turkish coast.

Yet it...