Greece must stop granting blank checks to Trump, says opposition chief Tsipras

ATHENS — Greece needs to cool its cozy relationship with MAGA, opposition leader and former Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras told POLITICO in an interview.

Mapping out his agenda for a general election expected by next spring, the left-winger Tsipras criticized current conservative Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis for making excessive concessions to the U.S., contrasting him with Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, who blocked U.S. forces from using bases there.

While much of Europe is turning its back on MAGA, Greece is doubling down on the relationship with U.S. President Donald Trump. Mitsotakis’ government has granted the U.S. open-ended access to pivotal military bases throughout the country — including its major naval base on Crete — instead of a regular renewal with renegotiation of terms.

Tsipras said Mitsotakis had gone too far. “Greek-U.S. relations are strategic in nature and must be guided by mutual benefit,” he said. “The government is pursuing a policy of blank checks, and this does not serve our national interests.”

Fifty-one-year-old Tsipras insisted the priority for the use of the bases had to be Greece’s domestic security, rather than just acceding to U.S. demands.

“This is an issue that has arisen with great intensity during the recent war in Iran. We saw what the reaction of the Greek prime minister was, and what that of the Spanish prime minister was.”

His pre-election stance that Greece should keep a greater distance from Washington is clearly intended to chime with widespread popular skepticism about Trump. In a survey by the Pew Research Center in late June, only 22 percent of Greeks surveyed expressed confidence in the U.S. president’s handling of international affairs.

Tsipras, who lost power in 2019, gained international prominence as leader of the radical Syriza party that confronted Brussels and Berlin in high-stakes rounds of brinkmanship at the height of the eurozone debt crisis.

He launched a new political party, Elas, in May, intending to unite the country’s fragmented opposition against Mitsotakis’ New Democracy party. He has already emerged as the No. 2 force in Greece, but still considerably behind the prime minister. POLITICO’s Poll of Polls puts New Democracy on 30 percent and Elas on 17 percent.

An election is expected before Greece takes over the rotating presidency of the Council of the EU in July 2027.

Should he be premier for that Council presidency, Tsipras said he would emphasize cohesion spending to reduce the economic disparities between EU regions, and raised the prospect of taxing big business more.

“Social cohesion should be strengthened, and European own resources should be increased. This means there must be the political will to tax multinationals, as well as carbon emissions,” he said.

Given the security threats to Europe, Tsipras agreed that investment in the defense industry had to grow, but not at the expense of social spending.

“If this happens, in a few years we will be left with an EU that is stronger in defense and governed by far-right governments.”

Greece’s corruption tax

Tsipras still faces the major challenge that Mitsotakis remains robustly in the top spot in polls.

Despite a series of major scandals that have rocked the country — including the government’s botched response to Greece’s deadliest train crash and a massive fraud involving EU agricultural funds — the government has kept its lead, partly thanks to a highly divided opposition.

Tsipras says that is exactly why he created his new movement.

“The picture is not positive for the government,” he says, “but rather negative for the opposition, and that is why Elas was created.”

Indeed, he stressed that public frustration with corruption would ultimately have to move the political needle.

He cited polls showing that about 70 percent of Greeks want political change, that some 90 percent consider corruption is widespread and that around 55 percent said they were better off in 2019 than they are now.

He observed that Greek households had to face a double hit over the past seven years: a high cost of living and widespread corruption.

Annual inflation in Greece stood at 5.2 percent in May 2026, outpacing the broader euro area average of 3.2 percent. According to the 2026 UBS Global Wealth Report, wealth inequality has increased, with fewer and fewer people benefiting from the growth of total aggregate wealth. Even though net worth has been expanding steadily since 2020, the gap between the rich and the general population continues to grow.

“We have the invisible corruption tax — and I call it a tax because I believe that the cost of the widespread and unprecedented levels of corruption in Greece is so great that it deprives social policy of resources,” he said.

“Every euro lost through direct awards in public tenders and the misappropriation of European funds is a euro lost from public schools, teachers’ salaries, public hospitals, and nurses’ wages,” he added.

When asked about the political implications of his reputation as a maverick radical from the eurozone crisis, Tsipras said many people only remembered his premiership for the wild first six months when Athens was on a precipice and liable to crash out of the eurozone.

He portrayed himself instead as the leader of a party that finally steadied the ship.

“There is an effort to focus on the first six months of the premiership from January to July [2015], but there is also the period before and after. The country didn’t enter the crisis because of our policies … We reached a difficult agreement, marked by conflicts and tensions, but ended the bailouts, restored the economy’s credibility and achieved positive growth rates.”