During a Q&A session hosted by the website of the British newspaper Guardian, Alexis Tsipras expressed his certainty that SYRIZA will be the first party in modern Greek history that will come to power without having promised to hire its “client voters” in the public sector.
The leader of SYRIZA and the European Left candidate for the presidency of the European Commission, following… Obama’s example participated on Tuesday noon in a live chat with the readers of the electronic edition of The Guardian. Alexis Tsipras discussed the issues of the Greek debt, Greek foreign policy, the relations of a Left Greek government with its European partners and the EU and also the primary surplus.
“The Memorandum was not put in place to rescue Greece, but as a self-contained political plan of Chancellor Merkel’s,” Alexis Tsipras argued, adding that “everything is renegotiable as soon as there’s a government in Europe ready to take a stand against this plan”. However, he rushed to clarify that Greece is not going to leave the eurozone. “Ms. Merkel herself has admitted (…) that if Greece were to leave the euro, the EZ would fall apart,” SYRIZA leader stressed.
“The political elite of Europe have led Europe to a dead-end. These are the people responsible for turning Europe back to the times of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables–they are the past. We are the future of hope and change”, Alexis Tsipras added.
Referring to Greece, he underlined that the primary surplus is “a political artefact and it is based on the Troika’s will to help keep in place the government of Mr Samaras”.
“The political change in Greece will set an example for all of Europe. The renegotiation of the new Left Greek government won’t be done only on behalf of the Greek people, but of the entire European periphery” he argued.
“SYRIZA has in its program the immediate goal of large-scale redistribution of income from the rich to the poor” he said, expressing his certainty that SYRIZA will be the next government of Greece. “Even as a single-party government, we will still seek cooperation with other forces, because the problems that the country faces are severe,” he stressed.
A. Tsipras identified as the main targets of a Left government the struggle against austerity, the write-off of a large amount of the outstanding Greek debt to make it sustainable and the implementation of a national development plan.
“The only way for Europe to exit the crisis is a European New Deal”, SYRIZA leader said.