Mitsotakis to CNN's Fareed Zakaria: The Greek people turned their backs on populism

The Greek people grew tired of policies that encouraged anger and nationalism and realized these led nowhere, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis told CNN's Fareed Zakaria in an interview aired on Sunday afternoon.

Commenting on his party's victory during national elections on July 7, and explaining the resounding loss of extreme-right Golden Dawn party which lost all its seats in parliament, Mitsotakis said that underlying both factors was the Greek people's exhaustion with populism.

"After experimenting with populism, I think that the pendulum is clearly swinging in the opposite direction," the premier said. He noted that his party's campaign encouraged a patriotic but non-nationalist platform, and preferred to focus on issues of immediate concern to Greek voters: overtaxation, lack of investments, creating new job opportunities and improving the efficacy of the public sector.

Voters's choice was based more on logic than on emotion, he noted, which was not suprising, given four years of rule by an incompetent government, Mitsotakis said.