Greek Pm announces a billion euros for electricity bill subsidies in August

“We are meeting again today – the last meeting before the short break in August – with a broad agenda, while the battle with the fires continues,” Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said in his opening remarks at the cabinet meeting on Thursday.

Referring to the fires, the prime minister underlined that this is a confrontation with the climate crisis “which is unfortunately aggravated by human negligence and deliberate arsonist actions.”

“Humanity’s struggle against nature has always been uneven,” he said and added: “Our goal is to make it less uneven, as much as we can, and with the fewest possible repercussions, with priority always being given to the protection of human life,” he said.

On energy issues, the prime minister said: “As we have announced, we continue to boost the measures against electricity price increases, effectively exhausting our fiscal margins, which are obviously increased and improved due to the good performance of the national economy. But I want to remind everyone that natural gas has increased tenfold. Ten times more expensive than it was before this energy crisis started.”

“In August, however, the accounts of households and businesses will be subsidized in total from all the resources at our disposal, with an amount exceeding one billion, and this for just one month. And in this way, up to 90% of the increases for households are absorbed, horizontally for everyone, regardless of whether it is consumption for a main house or a holiday home,” he underlined.

The prime minister also referred to reforms in the education sector, highlighting the fact that the announcement about the minimum threshold for admission to universities will this year be made earlier than ever before and more specifically by the end of this week.