Parliament strips immunity from Konstantopoulou and Polakis, keeps it for two ministers

The plenary of the Greek Parliament decided on Tuesday to lift the parliamentary immunity of “Course of Freedom” leader Zoi Konstantopoulou and SYRIZA MP Pavlos Polakis, fully adopting the Ethics Committee’s recommendation, as ProtoThema reports.

Konstantopoulou’s immunity was lifted by 163 votes in favor and 64 against (9 present), following the defamation lawsuit by journalist Petros Kousoulos. She described the case as “a fabricated lawsuit ordered by the Georgiadis system” and an “organized SLAPP procedure,” stressing that it is her 16th case of this kind and that she has 30 open files “from ND.” Polakis’s immunity was lifted by 159 votes in favor and 72 against (3 present), following the lawsuit by former KEELPNO official Stamatis Poulis over false accusations related to Polakis’s testimony on March 17, 2026. Polakis joked in the chamber: “Mrs. Konstantopoulou, you’ve outdone me… it’s the 14th lifting of my immunity,” adding that Poulis sues him constantly to obscure what happened at KEELPNO.

In contrast, the plenary refused to lift immunity for Migration and Asylum Minister Thanos Plevris and Development Minister Takis Theodorikakos: 168 votes against, 51 in favor, and 17 present, out of 236 MPs participating in the vote. The file on the two ministers concerns unlawful processing of personal data, following a complaint by a private individual to the Personal Data Protection Authority.

Plevris defended himself: the complaint came from a police officer to whom he had sent pre-election SMS messages; the Authority had archived the case twice; the complainant had been his client as a lawyer for the Special Guards union and had sent him congratulatory messages. He accused PASOK of “trailing behind the Course of Freedom” in the vote on lifting his immunity. Theodorikakos said the Authority had twice rejected the complaints as inadmissible and attributed the case to political motives: the complainant had emailed him asking him to intervene to delete a disciplinary prosecution against him — “He asked me to commit a flagrant breach of duty… I never answered him. I never sent a message to anyone.”

SYRIZA changed its stance between the two votes: in the Ethics Committee it had voted against lifting the ministers’ immunity, but in the plenary it voted in favor. MP Christos Giannoulis justified the change: “If you weren’t government ministers, would you have an acquittal proposal? If you were Polakis or Konstantopoulou, would the plenary have stripped your immunity?”