ATHENS: Greece’s Prime Minister sacked the country’s agriculture minister on Monday after video surfaced of him laughing approvingly as a local party official expounded on how compensation payments for natural disasters can help win elections. A government statement said Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis spoke to the minister, Spilios Livanos, to demand an explanation over his reaction to the “unacceptable reference.”
The statement said Livanos “admitted that he should have reacted differently” and offered his resignation, which was accepted.
The video was from a meeting Livanos attended last week in Sparta in southern Greece.
In it the mayor, himself a former cabinet official when Mitsotakis’ conservative New Democracy party was in government in 2004-2009, is heard saying that the party was able to win the 2007 election against the odds “by taking bags (of money) to compensate” people afflicted by wildfires that had ravaged southern Greece weeks earlier, killing scores of people.
Livanos appeared in the video to laugh and say it would be hard to match that “epic achievement.” During his visit to Sparta, he had announced compensation payments to farmers who suffered crop damage from frost.
Mitsotakis became party leader in 2016 and was not a member of the 2004-2009 government.
Greece’s next parliamentary election is scheduled for next year.