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Ex-prime minister Alexis Tsipras asks Greeks for second chance
Ex-prime minister asks Greeks for second chance – YouTube
On the final day of campaigning for Greece’s general elections, former Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has called on the Greeks to give him a second chance. The leader of SYRIZA party has promised his supporters to continue the struggle against austerity. Press TV’s Constantine Venizelos has more in the following report.
Greece’s election race is neck and neck — and Athens could still drag Europe into another crisis
Greeks are heading to the polls to choose their government again this weekend — though you wouldn’t know it from the relative silence in the international media.
The left-wing Syriza party was catapulted to power in January on an anti-bailout ticket, but it buckled and agreed to a renewed austerity-for-funding agreement with Greece’s international creditors in July.
Now, after calling snap elections, Syriza promises to implement the agreement more fairly than had been the case.
As in most other countries, the leftists want to cut the deficit with tax increases, while the right wants spending cuts.
The election is looking unexpectedly close. Popular Unity, a group of Syriza’s most left-wing members of parliament, quit the party and is running separately. Now the remaining Syriza MPs are pretty much neck and neck with New Democracy, the centre-right party that held government previously.
Europe has already won this election, and the brunt of the next government’s programme has been decided in Brussels already. International headlines have disappeared, and Athens is no longer the centre of attention for global financiers.
Europe has even moved on to a new crisis.
Things are no doubt more stable in Greence than they were ealrier this year, but the actual debt deal doesn’t seem any more likely to be implemented by whichever side wins on Sunday.
The country’s tremendously large privatisation programme will be a huge millstone even for a centre-right government, let alone for a party like Syriza.
The country still has to run significant budget surpluses and try to implement many of the structural reforms that it has failed to pass before. There’s no guarantee of success, and success is required to get debt relief from the eurozone…………….
…………………… The polls are tight between New Democracy and Syriza, but neither looks likely to come anywhere near an overall majority. There will be the difficult task of building a coalition with smaller centrist and centre-left parties. That could be particularly hard for former Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, who seemed to rule out most potential coalition partners early in the campaign.
And even if New Democracy wins, it’s not as if the social forces that brought Syriza to power have disappeared. The Greek economy has been shattered, unemployment is still extremely high, and the cash shortage that was exacerbated by capital controls continues.
Based on the requirements of the bailout, the state of the country’s politics, and the general economic outlook for Europe, which seems more likely: That Greece will run into new political and economic turmoil? Or that it will surmount its problems and come to a sustainable agreement with its European partners?
Don’t take your eye off what’s happening in Athens just yet.
Source: http://blogdogcicle.blogspot.com/2015/09/ex-prime-minister-alexis-tsipras-asks.html
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