It’s now more-or-less “out of the bag”, but a significant, albeit minority segment of ruling SYRIZA party wants to return to the …drachma!

Top minister Panagiotis Lafazanis, who expresses the leftist party even more radical left wing, reportedly told supporters at a central Athens hotel on Tuesday evening that his “Left Platform” grouping’s “road map” includes the “taking” of 22 billion euros from the Bank of Greece to pay (public sector only) wages and pensions for a year. A year, he said, was enough to introduce the new national currency, i.e. the previous and chronically weak drachma.

“Our road map is to go to a national currency, which we should have already done, or, we can do it now, taking 22 billion euros from the Bank of Greece, with which we’ll pay wages and pensions, and in the interim we’ll use the time to print our own currency,” he was quoted as saying by the Athens television station Skai.

Nevertheless, there was no official statement issued, nor was any decision taken at the event.

Lafazanis, who began his political career in the old-guard and orthodox Communist Party of Greece (KKE), holds the wordy portfolio of “Productive Reconstruction, Environment and Energy.”
The latest reports referring to the SYRIZA MPs belonging to the Left Platform, a far-left wing that is virulently anti-capitalist and more aligned to the radical communist left, estimate that a large number of those deputies will vote “present” in the Wednesday evening Parliament plenary session, which will be convened s;specifically to approve the latest agreement with creditors, i.e. “Greekment”.

The event came a short time before a taped interview by Greek PM Alexis Tsipras with state-run ERT broadcaster.