NEWS

Archbishop is caught out by tape

A tape made public yesterday of controversial comments by Archbishop Christodoulos regarding right-wing candidates in the Athens-Piraeus prefectural elections confirms what the Church leader hastened to deny at the time: that Christodoulos publicly attributed a surge in support for Giorgos Karadzaferis’s extreme-right LAOS party to «good Christians» disgusted by mainstream conservative New Democracy’s candidate, Yiannis Tzannetakos, who had strongly criticized the Church’s campaign to restore the religious faith slot to state identity cards. Speaking to 100 Church radio station workers on October 14 – on the morrow of the first round of municipal and prefectural elections – Christodoulos said, according to the tape played yesterday by Flash radio, that Karadzaferis’s 13.6 percent showing was due to «a temporary majority of people dissatisfied with [Tzannetakos].» «Karadzaferis would not even have got 1 percent had [ND] chosen another nominee,» he added. «They called us extreme right-wingers and such nonsense… Those who [voted Karadzaferis] are very good Christians.»

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