With two “last-minute” announcements, the year and the cycle of announcements of new benefits for 2024 comes to a close. In his speech before the new state budget was passed in parliament yesterday, in addition to announcing the measures for banks, Kyriakos Mitsotakis also outlined a small package of benefits (“exhausting to the fullest the fiscal margins,” he said), emphasizing 130.000 minimum wage earners who are exempt from paying for their medicines and will get them for free, and additionally 150,000 uniformed workers who will be recognized for the dangerousness of the services they provide.

The announcement for CSAS beneficiaries is for new pensioners who retired after the abolition of the Social Solidarity Benefit for Pensioners in 2016. Those ECAS beneficiaries until then retained their right to be exempted from participation in medication. However, since then until today, another 130,000 new pensioners have emerged who received the same or lower pension (below 500 or 400 euros per month!) but did not have access to free medicines, as have another 180,000 pensioners who were also beneficiaries of EKAS before 2016. With the new data, a total of 310,000 old and new minimum pensioners will be relieved of a very significant financial burden to pay for medicines.

The announcement comes at a time when many have been publicly pushing or fostering expectations of an additional ban on low-income pensioners. However, the data and the new budget rules for the Budget left room only for free drugs and not for an additional benefit to pensioners, as for the rest of us, which will be paid to them this week as an emergency support payment, alongside January pensions which will also receive a 2.4% increase.

The scenarios for uniformed workers

For members of the Greek Police, Fire Brigade, Coast Guard, and Armed Forces, the prime minister spoke of “practical recognition” of the dangerousness of their profession. Here things are not yet clear, neither about the type or amount of the benefit, nor the timing of its payment.

One of the plans that was reportedly being discussed in the past days and weeks in the economic staff was to give a salary increase or a one-time annual special allowance. However, as the new budget just passed does not provide for a commitment to a corresponding salary increase (of possibly €500 or €600 per year for each beneficiary or €75-90 million in total per year), it does not seem clear whether their payment can start in 2025 or the following year.

Much will become clearer today at 11 am, however, as the Minister of National Economy and Finance Kostis Hatzidakis will announce details of the Prime Minister’s announcements, as well as on the doubling of the ENFIA on the seized properties of banks and servicers or on the reductions in charges and all the other new measures to facilitate depositors and borrowers, which Kyriakos Mitsotakis announced yesterday in Parliament.