ATHENS – The migration crisis can only be dealt with effectively by cooperation and not by clashing with Turkey, SYRIZA-Progressive Alliance leader Alexis Tsipras said on Thursday while touring Thrace.

It is important for Turkey’s leadership to understand that it is useless to count on escalating tension, the main opposition leader said. “It stands to lose, not gain anything, by this tension,” Tsipras said. “It stands to gain nothing from using human pain for political reasons, as we saw from the Erdogan government in March 2020 at Evros” border region, he added.

Speaking at the Concert Hall of Komotini, where he lashed out at the government and what he called “the complete failure of Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis in almost all he promised,” Tsipras said that he heard people in Thrace and their concerns, especially those of the younger generation. Promoting democratic reforms in the Muslim minority of Thrace he said would “correct the serious mistakes of the past and simultaneously annul Turkey’s unacceptable interventions on issues related to Greek citizens.”

“This government must leave as soon as possible to put an end to the bleeding of the country and society and bringing them to their knees,” he said, asserting that the next party to win the elections whenever they are held would be Syriza’s, a progressive one. The country is now “caught in the vise of the pandemic and rising prices, it is also in a Mitsotakis vise,” he said, criticizing the PM for “handling the pandemic in a way that creates more problems than providing solutions.”