With two days until the elections in the country, Greece’s former Prime Minister, George Papandreou, has made an appeal to the Greek people, saying that the country’s current objective must be to implement widespread reforms.
Writing on his personal website, Papandreou said that Greece “must demonstrate to its partners credibility and a capacity of solvency, and this can be done by a broad coalition government, a government of national co-responsibility, which continues in its attempts to bring about the major changes needed to tackle the problem at its source”.
The former Prime Minister has invited voters to think carefully about who to vote for, calling Antonis Samaras and Alexis Tsipras, the leaders of New Democracy and Syriza respectively, “two sides of the same coin”.
“Samaras’ responsibilities are enormous and of historic dimension,” Papandreou writes. “First of all, he has always refused to recognize his party’s share of responsibility for the situation in which the country currently finds itself. He has also placed himself at the head of the so-called anti-memorandum forces, an anomalous and opportunistic alliance of political forces, which has tried to convince people that the crisis is the consequence of the memorandum, rather than the memorandum being the consequence of the crisis”.
Moving on to the Syriza party, Papandreou writes that “it is nothing but a disguised form of those obsessed with opportunism and demagogy, a phenomenon that we experienced in abundance in the years following the fall of the regime of the colonels. This party says that it does not want the memorandum, but it wants the money of the memorandum because it knows full well that without the money the country is at risk. It does not want the memorandum but it wants an even greater debt reduction through the memorandum”.
Papandreou also defends his own decision to adopt the memorandum, saying that “it neither was nor is a panacea, but it was a necessary solution of salvation and a step back from the edge.” Papandreou concludes,”The memorandum could certainly have been better if the relationship between forces in Europe had been different.”
(source: ANSA)
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