Tsipras: election offers a stark choice
SYRIZA leader Alexis Tsipras claimed in his interview to the major TV outlets Sunday that conservative New Democracy wants to amplify its May 21 victory in the new election on June 25 to install an “unaccountable regime” with a weak, splintered opposition and says the upcomingpolls represent a stark choice between two vastly different government programs.
On May 21,SYRIZA won 20.07% of votes, almost 11.5 points below its 2019 result (31.53%), while New Democracy slightly increased its share of the vote from 39.85% to 40.79% where the country lurched from crisis to crisis, althoughthese were mostly international ones.
While five parties cleared the 3% threshold that ensures parliamentary representation on May 21, recent opinion polls show that at least seven, and maybe 8, will make it on June 25. While this will reduce the number of seats New Democracy will win, it will also make for a more fragmented opposition; all four parties that trailed New Democracy on May 21 will likely elect fewer MPs this time.
Tsipra said the upcoming election is not “Round 2” but a totally different one. The change of electoral system from simple proportional representation to a “fortified” variant giving bonusseats to the winner means tha this will be a stark choice between the top two parties, Tsipras said.
The opposition leader admitted, once again, that the proportional representation which his party championed and which it voted while in government has been delegitimized, because no one among the other “progressive” opposition parties, that is, to the left of New Democracy, answered SYRIZA’s call for a coalition government.
Tsipras called on citizens to vote for his party to prevent the “nightmare scenario” as he called it of an all-powerful New Democracy installing the above-mentioned “unaccountable regime.” Tsipras had called the New Democracy government a “regime” throughout its four-year term and had claimed it was ideologically closer, and operated similarly to, Hungary’s Orban government.
“I insist that nothing is final until the people have decided with their votes.” Tsipras said. The choice, he said, is between a strong welfare state and onne where the fittest survive; between a strong democracy and the diminution of the rule of law; between a strong, innovative economy and the clientelism that benefits the few; bewtween a thriving health system and and one where treatment is selectively given; well-paid work and uninsured, precarious jobs.
Tsipras claimed a Parliament with seven or eight parties would be a “picturesque and devalued” one.
