After saying there wouldn’t be snap elections even if New Democracy took a beating in the May 25 elections for Greek municipalities and the Europan Parliament, Prime Minister Antonis Samaras said a big win by the major opposition Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA) could force national polls before his coalition’s term runs out in 2016.
Samaras admitted – as had his partner, PASOK Socialist chief Evangelos Venizelos – that a SYRIZA win could bring down the government that has only a two-vote majority in Parliament.
Venizelos, under siege in his party after backing austerity measures that led to the Socialists falling to 3-5 percent in the polls, had tied it to the new center-left political movement Elia, Olive Tree, in a desperate bid to keep it from disintegrating. In 2009, PASOK got 44 percent of the vote when it won national elections.
In his last campaign speech before the vote, Samaras anxiously implored voters to give a mandate to his government even if they disagreed with the big pay cuts, tax hikes, slashed pensions and worker firings he imposed on orders of the Troika of the European Union-International Monetary Fund-European Central Bank (EU-IMF-ECB) that put up 240 billion euros ($330.7 billion) in two bailouts.
He said he’s bringing economic recovery, despite record unemployment and poverty, and promised political stability to ensure Greece does not “turn back” to the same conditions that created the crisis: wild overspending and political patronage by his party and PASOK over the decades.
Before a small crowd in Syntagma Square in his only open-air address of the campaign, he blistered SYRIZA and said it was a danger to Greece and would bring it back to economic disaster.
“Only an accident can take Greece back again and SYRIZA is the accident that must not happen,” said the premier.
“They want to bring down the government, now that we are due to agree on further debt relief at the end of the summer,” said Samaras, referring to planned negotiations with the Eurozone to cut Greece’s debt, even if that means making taxpayers in the other 17 countries in the financial bloc pay the cost.
“Do you want there to be early elections, instability and uncertainty?” he added. “You must decide.”
He said he would never ever again put more austerity on Greeks although the government is going ahead with more planned pension cuts and it takes years for retirees to get what they are due.
“For two years, I have been tearing up the memorandums, month by month, page by page,” he told the crowd. “That is how we got to be in the position where we do not need any more memorandums,” he added, referring to deals with the Troika.
New Democracy trailed SYRIZA in four opinion polls released May 23 and took another hit when a former minister, Thanasis Giannopoulos, said he was quitting the party and took a shot at Samaras on the way out.
“I cannot be considered a political devotee of this New Democracy, of Samaras and his gang,” he said, adding that he expects developments on the center-right of the Greek political spectrum to follow the elections.
“Who will be the person that leads the large center-right party? It will be someone, but it will not be Antonis Samaras,” added Giannopoulos.
In contrast, journalist Stavros Theodorakis said his populist, anti-politician movement To Potami (The River,) which was formed as an antidote to the mainstream political parties he campaigned against, said he’s willing to work with the ideological rivals New Democracy and SYRIZA.
If To Potami wins seats in the European Parliament, he will pick who he wants to work with and said that would be the same parties he blamed for the crisis and who were the reason why he formed the group.
“I am ready to work with Samaras and Tsipras based on a plan for the country,” he told Real FM, without adding that Samaras and Tsipiras said they would never work with each other.
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