Greece’s Official Campaign for May 21 Elections Kicks Off
The dissolution of Greece’s Parliament has launched the official campaign for Greece’s May 21 elections although rival party leaders had already fired salvos at each other in what promises to be a gruelling affair.
President Katerina Sakellaropoulou, as part of the process, approved a request by Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis to end Parliament’s session and the shots began ringing out.
“I hope we have a calm and fruitful pre-election period, for the good of the country,” said
Sakellaropoulou, reported Reuters, but that had already been busted with Mitsotakis taking heat from the major opposition he unseated, the rebranded SYRIZA-Progressive Alliance.
“Elections are a great celebration of democracy,” Mitsotakis told local press in a statement, adding that he too hoped the campaigning wouldn’t be done in a toxic atmosphere, in what itself what a thinly-veiled swipe at SYRIZA.
There will almost certainly be two elections, however, as a change in electoral law brought by SYRIZA when it was in power removes a 50-seat bonus in the 300-member Parliament for whichever party comes in first.
That was seen done to give SYRIZA a chance to form a coalition government if it doesn’t come in first although Mitsotakis’ New Democracy government, wanting to keep ruling outright, passed an amendment providing a sliding scale of 20-50 extra seats for a winner in a second round, expected in July.
Despite seeing his party’s lead fall to 2.9 percent after being blamed for a head-on train collision that killed 57, the New Democracy Conservatives are ahead now by 6.9 percent, said a poll by Metron Analysis, a surveillance scandal now fading.
Mitsotakis said he’s bringing a faster economic recovery during the waning COVID-19 pandemic that society has largely put in the rear view mirror although it’s still infecting, hospitalizing and killing people.
Tsipras, who changed his party’s name from the Radical Left after taking a beating in July, 2019 snap elections, has already castigated Mitsotakis’ nearly four years in power and said the Premier is “in a state of panic and lies unashamedly,” ending any idea of a civil campaign.
Mitsotakis promised better wages and incomes, better jobs, better pensions, Tsipras said, but “today, the middle-class lives on vouchers for the supermarket, for car petrol, for electricity,” reported the state-run Athens-Macedonia News Agency AMNA.
Tsipras pledged if he is elected in government he will bring wage increases, price reductions, personal debt settlements and “an honest and efficient state,” without explaining why he didn’t do it while ruling previously for 4 ½ years.
DEEP STATE OR DEEP DIVISIONS?
He said his victory “Will give rise to a long-term progressive government of stable collaboration (with other parties,”) but if New Democracy wins, he said, “will lead us to second and third elections, political instability and uncertainty.”
In third place in surveys, PASOK-KINAL Movement for Change leader Nikos Androulakis pledged to introduce “a new era of social justice and national dignity, for the country’s progressive democratic people to have a genuine choice, away from elitism and populism that hurt Greeks for 15 years, leading to toxicity and division,” the report said.
Androulakis was speaking in Karditsa, western Thessaly, where he met with local residents and party affiliates at a central cafe. “Cheap conflicts lead nowhere, except to the struggle for power,” he noted.
How is it possible, Androulakis said, the Greece in 2023 “has a wiretapping Deep State and a supposedly liberal Prime Minister who will do anything to protect (…) powerful business interests that were selling this illegal software?”
That was in reference to Predator spyware the government had allowed to be sold before banning it after an attempt was made to install it on Androulakis’ phone as it had been on the cell phone of an investigative journalist.
“We have a duty as a democratic party to strengthen the quality of democracy, in the face of the digital parastate that both Mr. Tsipras and Mr. Mitsotakis set up ten years ago,” said Androulakis.
Before he called for the Parliament to be dissolved, Mitsotakis talked with residents at the central square of Megalopolis, a major electricity-producing center and then went to the the central Peloponnesian city as part of his tour of the regions of Argolid, Arcadia and Messinia.
“We are entering this pre-electoral time with the full confidence of a party that has honored the agreement of truth we ‘signed’ with Greek men and women in July 2019,” he said.
He said if he’s elected again that his government will pay greater attention to the regions facing uncertainty due to the gradual phasing out of coal mining following the European Union’s green transition program.
Megalopolis and Ptolemaida (in western Macedonia) have historically relied heavily on an economy of coal-fired electricity production plants he said he would phase out but put back on line after an energy crisis sparked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Both these regions “have secured the maximum possible subsidies and financing,” he noted, therefore “Megalopolis is bound to attract other types of investors who will come here,” without adding who they would be or why.
Mitsotakis said that farmers and livestock breeders will see their costs reduced by the use of photovoltaic panels, “to become even more competitive,” not providing any details about that either.
thenationalherald
