The latest mini furor to erupt at the end of the week on Greece’s political landscape follows a controversial column by a ruling SYRIZA party MP, who on Thursday referred to an “undeclared class war” by the leftist government.
Deputy Giorgos Kyritsis, who assumed a Parliament seat after another SYRIZA MP resigned in the wake of her opposition to two articles in tax bill ratified over the weekend, had recently served as a media coordinator vis-a-vis the government’s efforts to deal with the ongoing refugee crisis.
“The SYRIZA government is waging an undeclared class war in favor of the lower (income) strata (of society) and against the more well-off … That’s exactly why it (SYRIZA) was voted for in September (2015), in order to shift, as much as it can, the burdens to the ‘pro-Europe supporters’, and that is exactly what it is doing,” he wrote.
The column appeared in the small-circulation and party-affiliated “Avgi” daily, where Kyritsis was employed as an editor before seeking office with the party whose political positions are expressed by the newspaper.
In basing his class-warfare model for Greece in 2016, he further writes:
“If you tax me with 60 percent and I make 7,000 euros (a year), I’m left with 3,000 euros to get by… If you tax a person with 60 percent who makes 500 euros then he cannot survive.”
The reaction by a main opposition New Democracy (ND) spokesman was immediate and came via Twitter:
“Resistance to cynical messages of enviousness and divisiveness; this is an issue of democracy and a condition for national existence,” ND spokesman Giorgos Koumoutsakos Tweeted on his account.
