Main opposition New Democracy (ND) party’s press office director this week warned that the continued presence of the current leftist-rightist coalition government in Greece “is sinking the economy”.
Makarios Lazaridis, in an interview with the Athens daily “Eidiseis”, which was published on Good Friday, said the “presence of (the) SYRIZA-AN.EL (parties) in power is sinking the economy, costing society dearly, while entailing serious risks” for the country.
“The country remains in intensive care and desperately needs oxygen to breathe; it needs an immediate political change,” Larazidis said, in referring to the ruling SYRIZA party, and its junior coalition partner, the small rightist-populist Independent Greeks’ (AN.EL) party.
Both leftist SYRIZA and its junior partner rode a wave of anti-bailout, anti-austerity sentiment to power in January 2015, but subsequently buckled to creditors’ demands and signed and ratified a third memorandum in August 2015.
Lazaridis pointed to what he called a “disappearing” SYRIZA, on a daily basis, predicting that the current Greek government will not reach the end of its term, in 2019.
“We’re concerned that the country will come apart in this very dangerous government’s hands; as long as they remain (in power) risks increase, that’s why we’re (ND) insisting on the need for political change; they should have already left. (PM Alexis) Tsipras and (defence minister Panos) Kammenos (the coalition party leader) can’t lead the country out of the crisis,” Lazaridis said.
His comments come as all mainstream opinion polls in the country show center-right New Democracy fielding a double-digit percentage point lead over leftist SYRIZA.
Finally, the ND cadre said the year-long delay in concluding a second review of the Greek program (third bailout) is due to the incompetence, handwringing and ideological obsessions of the current Tsipras government, adding that the weaker strata of Greek society will suffer from the recently agreed to austerity measures for 2019 and 2020.
In a diametrically opposing view, the government spokesman on Friday appeared certain that elections will be held on schedule, “and their holding is determined by the (Greek) constitution and not by ND’s desire and the interests it represents.”
Spokesman Dimitris Tzanakopoulos’ statements were published in yet another Athens daily, this time in the leftist-leading “Efimerida ton Syntakton”.
He said this message is aimed at all those “who until recently were sure of (snap) elections, and who demanded from creditors not to conclude the second review, so that political developments (in Greece) would emerge.”
The increasingly beleaguered Tsipras government achieved an agreement, in principle, with creditors on April 7, on the margins of a Eurogroup meeting in Valletta, Malta. The latter agreement ostensibly opens the way to finally conclude the second review of the Greek program. The highlights of the draft deal were Athens’ acceptance of more austerity measures in 2019 and 2020, mainly primary pension cuts in the former and an expansion of the tax base towards lower-income wage-earners and pensioners, in the latter.
“In the face of a new and third strategic impasse in nearly a year, Mr. (Kyriakos) Mitsotakis (the ND leader), New Democracy and the oligopolistic interests that have rallied around them, are trying to keep alive the early ballot scenario,” was Tzanakopoulos’ take on the current political situation in the bailout-dependent country.
