Europe is stuck between a rock and a hard place, austerity and closed borders, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said on Friday during a speech at a press conference in Paris for an event titled “Europe must change”, organized by Pierre Laurent, Secretary General of the French Communist Party and president of the European Left.
Tsipras was invited by French President Francois Hollande and will be a keynote speaker at a broad meeting on Europe organized by the Institute of International and Strategic Relations (IRIS).
“Europe is stuck between a rock and a hard place. It is crushed between austerity and closed borders,” he said in his intervention, adding that it is keeping borders closed for the downtrodden and open to extreme austerity policies. “We should reaffirm the guidelines of our policy and agree that Europe is at a political impasse.”
He continued to say that Europe is faced with the consequences of its actions and highlighted the wars in which European countries participated, such as Iraq, Libya, and Syria, adding that it has been proved “incapable” of resolving the Palestinian issue.
“Today, Europe is fearfully discovering that the problem has reached its courtyard. The Eastern European countries react with a nervous breakdown…not because their society could not absorb 1-2 million refugees, but because the austerity policies have nourished the monster of fascism in Europe’s underbelly…which they feed by reacting spasmodically,” he said and brought the result of Slovakia’s elections as an example.
He also said that despite the “disappointment”, Greece is determined to fight within Europe’s framework and not outside it.
(source: ana-mpa)
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