Greek Main Opposition Leader: We are Ready to Govern

Greek main opposition SYRIZA leader Alexis Tsipras expressed his confidence earlier today that his party is ready to govern the country, stressing that such a development would signal “a time of change and hope” for Greece and Europe in general.

“SYRIZA will provide solutions for the benefit of the people and the country,” he underlined while referring to the recent developments during a SYRIZA event on tourism. Furthermore, Tsipras declared that in a period when the country is heading toward a confrontation, the dilemmas would be whether austerity must continue or not, whether there should be an increase in medicine taxation or not, whether lay-offs should be liberalized and the poor pensioners’ benefit should be abolished or not.

Addressing the Greek people, he urged them to display “democratic vigilance,” while declaring that it is not the markets that determine the people’s right to dignity. The Greek voters were being terrorized by the spectre of a possible continuation of the “torture of new measures,” he added.

Commenting on the acceleration of the Presidential election process, Tsipras attacked the coalition government saying that “the speeding up of the procedures for the Presidential election by a Parliament that is politically de-legitimized and unable to give the broad consensus that the legislation requires for the election of the President of the Hellenic Republic, is effectively equal to the speeding up of the processes that will lead to general elections.

The speeding up of the processes – which, in effect, the main opposition has been asking for sometime now and which the government rejected as a so-called proposal of destabilization and uncertainty – yesterday became the government’s initiative out of necessity and not by choice. Because its policy has now reached destructive stalemates; because the society’s reaction to this policy has now become universal… In that respect, the speeding up of developments is an important popular and democratic victory,” while estimating that “in the upcoming elections, there will be a confrontation of two distinctive alternative political plans for our country: On one hand, Antonis Samaras’ plan that wants to turn the Memorandum into a regime. This is also described in the e-mails to the Troika and the revelations on the social security system, the cuts, the new taxes. On the other hand, there is SYRIZA’s political plan, with specific and firm steps, with confidence and security, from the first day of the new governance, just as we described at the Thessaloniki International Fair.”