ATHENS – Prime Minister and New Democracy (ND) leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis called on the party’s youth to provide critical feedback on the government’s efforts, at the ONNED annual congress on Friday evening held at the Metropolitan Expo in Athens.

The congress will run to Sunday and coincides with ND’s 45th anniversary since its founding in 1974 by the late Konstantinos Karamanlis.

Mitsotakis called on youth to “test us, and become our toughest judges in our efforts to make the future a present reality.” He also called on them “to become a hive of current ideas and an agency of new activism” in order to provide practical, instead of theoretical, solutions. The flight of young people abroad must stop, he said, and called on young people “to take advantage of the new institutional framework” at universities and exercise true academic freedom and the free exchange of ideas.

The premier urged young people to “do interesting things for yourselves and others, while you participate in common endeavors – protect your independence like a treasure, and, above all, don’t always play by the rules, but keep changing them for the better.”