Greece aims to digitize the full range of the public sector in the coming years, Digital Governance Minister Kyriakos Pierrakakis said on Thursday during a discussion with the state-run news agency AMNA, at the Olympia Forum conference.

“We had a plan that was ready beforehand…We knew what we wanted to accomplish. The pandemic added the dimension of necessity,” he said, adding that “in a few years we will have succeeded in digitizing the whole state.”

A total of 150 million digital transactions were completed in the first half of 2021, versus just 8.8 million in 2018, he said.

Asked what he considers to be his greatest achievement, Pierrakakis said cited the gov.gr portal, which he described as “an umbrella” under which every transaction is added, including the successful online vaccination platform.

“So, gov.gr is the great digital transformation of the country in the field of digital public services,” he said.

Discussing the possibility of setting up an electronic voting system, the minister said that the pairing of technology and democracy “should not be the first step.”

“The first thing you must do is to digitizse the state, step by step, improve services and build up people’s trust in these systems.”

This article was previously published at ekathimerini.com.