site.btaGreek Former PM Alexis Tsipras: Let Us Not Give Blank Cheque To New Democracy

Three days before the parliamentary elections in Greece, the leader of the left-wing SYRIZA and former Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras faced his supporters in the Athens with criticism aimed at the centre-right New Democracy, which is leading in the polls, but also at the centre-left PASOK movement, which is SYRIZA's main rival for the position of the leading opposition force after the elections.

Compared to the campaign ahead of the previous elections on May 21, Tsipras' speech on Thursday night was in a more negative vein and focused mainly on attacks on his political opponents - an atmosphere that probably reflects expectations of a virtually certain victory for New Democracy on Sunday.

Tsipras stressed that only a strengthening of SYRIZA's result would allow New Democracy not to get a "blank cheque" in the elections and impose a "no-holds-barred regime".

He accused the former centre-right ruling party of having a programme that "copies the blueprints of neoliberalism and a strategy that copies Machiavelli". Tsipras added that New Democracy's aim is to have a "fragmented and weak opposition", in effect favouring "certain parties that help these plans", referring to the centre-left PASOK, which he described as "a complement and a willing partner in the plans of the right".

Tsipras accused New Democracy of making commitments to voters that it had no intention of fulfilling, and its leader and then prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis submitted a Stability Plan to Brussels that contained none of its election promises.

The leader of SYRIZA has set as a major national objective for Greece to stop moving away from the EU average per capita income, because, according to him, since the beginning of the crisis the country has lost 18 percentage points on this indicator and is now competing with countries from the former Eastern bloc, such as Romania and Bulgaria. 

Tsipras reiterated the main points of his party's electoral programme, such as increasing the minimum wage to 880 euros with annual indexation according to price growth, increasing civil servants' salaries by 10 percent, bringing back the 13th pension, reducing VAT and other taxes on food and fuel.