Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras on Tuesday again promised Cabinet members, and by extension his poll-trailing SYRIZA party’s MPs and supporters, that he’ll exhaust the government’s four-year mandate practically to the very last day, saying elections will be held in autumn 2019.
In pointing to what he called his government’s accomplishments since September 2015, he cited a “restoration of the country’s credibility; establishing the necessary European alliances to break the taboo of austerity and …achieve a long period of political stability.”
The statements were carried live on the state-run public broadcaster.
Tsipras and his once radical leftist SYRIZA party achieved an electoral landslide in January 2015 on a populist-infused wave of anti-bailout and anti-austerity sentiment. After six months of shambolic negotiations with creditors up until to July 2015, Tsipras and his coalition government signed a third memorandum bailout a month later, coming in first-past-the-poll in a snap September 2015 election and again forming a “strange bedfellows” coalition government with the small right-wing AN.EL party.
The Greek prime minister again emphasized that the looming end of the third – and last, by all accounts – bailout in August 2018 marks a “key milestone” in his government’s achievements. He also claimed the development means an end to creditors’ supervision.
Institutional creditors, namely, the IMF and European Stability Mechanism (ESM), which has coalesced the Eurozone’s institutional lenders, have nevertheless repeatedly precluded the possibility of a fourth memorandum. At the same time, several EU and IMF officials have often referred to continued supervision of Greece’s state finances, with some pointing to oversight for many years to come.
