Parliament: Vote on SYRIZA's proposal for an inquiry into «manipulation of public opinion»

In Plenary Session of the Parliament the debate on the proposal by the President and the Members of the SYRIZA for setting up a committee of inquiry, with the object of investigating the «an operation of political manipulation of public opinion, trivialisation of institutions and waste of public money».

«The government, for a long time now, and even today, has been planning and executing a strategy of driving the press without stopping, under which fat packages of funding and state advertising are used as a weapon against opposition journalistic voices and as a reward for journalistic pens friendly to the government or conveniently silent,» SYRIZA said in its proposal and referred to political use of the pandemic to control the media. This is exactly the complaint that the opposition MPs are expected to make when they take to the podium to analyze and justify the proposal to set up a committee of inquiry.

The opposition, in its proposal, has called for a committee of inquiry to investigate «all cases of contracting out communication and information services to citizens, which were carried out in the name of the implementation of a campaign to protect public health, measures to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus and the participation of citizens in vaccination, without observing the principles of transparency and without objective criteria, namely the “Petsa List No 1”, the “Petsa List No 2”, the Ministry of Health's campaign for vaccination, and the above-mentioned award to ENTERPRISE GREECE».

It has also called for investigate «any waste of public money by the government to the Opinion Poll company, which conducts polls beyond any ethical boundaries with the sole aim of serving the government's political objectives and manipulating citizens, as well as the existence of any other polling companies whose owners maintain a parallel activity through which, directly or indirectly, they receive funding from the Greek State and the wider public sector».

SYRIZA's proposal has been submitted on the basis of Article 68 of the Constitution, which stipulates that the Parliament may set up two committees of inquiry per parliamentary term, if the relevant proposal of at least ten MPs is supported by two fifths of all MPs, regardless of the majority.