Greece will overcome the crisis and stay in the euro, the head of the conservative New Democracy party Antonis Samaras vowed ahead of a general election on Sunday critical for the country’s economy. “We will exit the crisis. We will not exit the euro.
We will not let anyone take us out of Europe,” Samaras, seen as a possible victor on Sunday, told thousands of cheering supporters in Athens’ central Syntagma Square.
The country is readying for its second election in six weeks with all the top candidates now calling for various degrees of renegotiation of a bailout deal despite warnings that Greece must toe the line or leave the euro.
“We are going into an election to decide the future of Greece and of our children,”.
“The first choice the Greek people must make is: euro versus drachma.”
“There are some outside Greece who want the country to be the black sheep and push it out of the euro. We will not please them,” Samaras said, in a speech laced with the anti-immigrant rhetoric on the rise in Greece as the economy flounders.
Samaras, 61, presents himself as the guarantor for Greece’s membership in the eurozone although he says he wants to renegotiate the “memorandum”, the bailout deal that has imposed harsh austerity conditions.
“If we break with our (EU) peers, they would force us to leave the euro, we would not be able to import anything, we would have to capitulate at much worse terms to secure our basic needs, it would be 10 times worse,” Samaras said.
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