Resigned prime minister Alexis Tsipras held at press conference on Monday from the same city where last year he unveiled his now infamous …Thessaloniki program — boosting social spending, state investments and scrapping the memorandum — although this year’s agenda was predictably dominated by his seven months in power and the third memorandum he negotiated and signed.
Making a customary appearance — despite now being the ex-PM — at the inauguration of an annual trade show in the northern Greece city, Tsipras repeated his campaign’s slogan of voters needing to choose between the “old versus the new”. “New” in this case is his radical leftist SYRIZA, and “old” is the other mainstream political parties, primarily his chief rivals, conservative New Democracy (ND).
Snap elections come on Sept. 20, with opinions polls showing a slight SYRIZA lead, a dead heat with ND or a slight ND lead.
Other Tsipras highlights:
— No post-election cooperation with ND.
— “… Greek people … will give SYRIZA the power to continue what was begun in January 2015”
— “Drachma (i.e. Grexit) is not the way out of the crisis”
— The memorandum he negotiated, signed and delivered to Parliament on behalf of the previous SYRIZA-AN.EL coalition government will be upheld, even if SYRIZA is not in the government. “Terms are harsh”, he said, while doubting whether his rivals could have done better with the third memorandum.
— He pointed to a reference for some type of future debt relief in the memorandum terms as a “success”
— He also pointed to the need for what he called a “growth shock” in order to decrease the enormous unemployment rate in the country, without going into too many details. He did mention the need for “investments”, which he said required a stable economy and tax system.
— He denied that he asked for loans from Putin’s Russia.
Proto Thema intervention to finally get a question answered
Meanwhile, after fielding questions from 35 local media outlets, large and small, some even obscure, Tsipras was ready to stand up and leave the conference hall after the two-hour briefing when Proto Thema political correspondent Yiannis Makriyiannis insisted on asking a press question. The reporter reminded that he represented Greece’s best-selling Sunday newspaper and the most popular news website in the Greek language.
“Does Mr. Tsipras not want to answer a question by the No. 1 selling newspaper in the country? ” was the off-the-agenda intervention as Tsipras and his associates were getting ready to leave.
After acquiescing to the “PT” question, Tsipras was queried over his promise, made last year as the opposition leader, to reinstate the so-called “13th pension”. The leftist leader was asked whether he felt compelled to provide an apology for the promises he made and didn’t fulfill. In terms of the pension issue, not only wasn’t an extra month added, but pensions were affected by memorandum-mandated decreases.
Here’s the response, made at the end of the press conference and after several “soft ball” questions were lobbed at the previous premier.
“On the fiscal level, we did not manage to implement our promises, exactly because we faced an unprecedented condition of (financial) asphyxiation, and exactly because the fiscal balance requires, in the coming period, to have another — brief and last — effort at fiscal adjustment,” he said.
While offering no apology, he pointed to “safeguarding” pensions, growth and decreasing debt as the axes of his new policy for a new SYRIZA government.
