Socialist PASOK leader Evangelos Venizelos on Friday announced he was stepping down from the party’s leadership, with a party congress announced for mid May.
He made the announcement during a meeting of the party’s political committee, with much of his address touching on procedural details and on how the once dominant Greek political party should restructure. His announcement came in the wake of PASOK’s poor showing in the Jan. 25 election, where it received 4.7 percent of the vote – 1.7 percentage points above the limit needed for Parliament representation.

Beyond his decision to resign, Venizelos launched into a sharp attack against the current leftist government, referring to a “fatal flirt with a credit incident; there’s a problem with the (cash) reserves.”

He continued by saying that the current government – comprised of a majority leftist bloc with the populist-rightist Independent Greeks’ (AN.EL) party – has lost valuable time and is “playing with fire”.

In touching on a particularly painful episode that led to the resignation of the PASOK prime minister George Papandreou from office in October 2011, Venizelos expressed his “sadness” over references to a “referendum” by top government officials.

He this position may lead to “a repeat of Cannes”, his spiked reminder that Papandreou returned from a disastrous meeting in Cannes with then French leader Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel only to announced a referendum.

No referendum was ever held and Papandreou resigned as prime minister days later.

”All of the problems have been exasperated over the past 50 days. We’re close to an internal payment stop, not one that affects wages and pensions, in the first phase, but debts to contractors etc … I am afraid that there is a desperate effort underway to maintain campaign commitments, and demagoguery, without (the government) able to legislate anything,” he said, adding:

“We are seeing naïve anti-West myths about Russia and China; roles that they themselves don’t want. We’re also seeing a blind anti-Germanism,” he warned.
Finally, the PASOK president and former top minister ridiculed the fact that the one-time EC-ECB-IMF “troika” has been renamed the “Institutions”, before matriculating into the “Brussels Group” – “now we have the Athens Group, which hides out in one hotel and then another.”