Former SYRIZA MP and President of the Hellenic Parliament Zoe Konstantopoulou blasts Greek PM and her ex-comrade Alexis Tsipras in an opinion article published in the online edition of British Guardian. The piece entitled “If you love Greece, help us get rid of Alexis Tsipras and his zombie party”, the left firebrand, who led a campaign for the write-off of Greek debt as odious, claimed the Greek prime minister and Syriza have betrayed their people and their principles, urging the Greek people to ditch them. “They have to go”, she wrote.
Last week was the third anniversary of the 2015 referendum, in which the Greek people voted no to more austerity, and no to the violation of democracy by the creditors.
The week before Alexis Tsipras, the prime minister who betrayed the brave no of the Greek people, visited London to present his capitulation to the troika of the European commission, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank as an achievement.
Imagine how the British people would view a prime minister elected to end privatisation, and who instead privatised almost every piece of public property; who was elected to serve peace, and who instead facilitated military action against targets in Syria and agreed to sell weapons to countries accused of committing international crimes; who was elected to protect people’s homes, and who stood by while banks seized them, leaving people homeless; who was elected to serve democracy and the independence of his country, and who instead turned it over to the EU, the IMF and the ECB.
This is what Tsipras did to the Greek people.
I was a Syriza MP and president of the Greek parliament during the seven months of the first Syriza government. When Tsipras signed the toxic third memorandum in 2015, I fought hard to protect our parliamentary procedures that he and the troika violated. In spite of continuous pressure, I refused to bend our democratic rules and accept more illegal debt for our people. Together with dozens of other Syriza MPs, I voted against the monstrous agreement.
Tsipras then dissolved parliament prematurely to get rid of me and the dissenting MPs.
Three years on, his capitulation to the troika has proved the disaster many of us predicted. People’s lives have become unbearable. Youth unemployment has become the norm and an estimated 8% of the population has left in search of work. The minimum salary doesn’t pay the bills, and hundreds of thousands of families go without electricity for extended periods of time.
This tragedy began in 2010, but Tsipras’s so-called left government has done everything to prove that it can implement austerity better than its predecessors. It even brags about exceeding the troika’s cruel targets in cuts and taxes.
read more at theguardian.com
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