ATHENS – Negotiations to form a coalition government took a detour on June 18th after PASOK Socialist leader Evangelos Venizelos told his New Democracy counterpart Antonis Samaras, whose party won the elections the day before, that he wanted voices added from anti-austerity parties opposed to the bailout deals the two parties signed and supported in return for international rescue loans.
New Democracy has 129 seats in the 300-member Parliament and needs another partner to gain a majority, and Samaras wooed his otherwise bitter ideological rival, Venizelos, who served with him in a shaky hybrid government and whose party won 33 seats in a third-place finish in the June 17 elections. Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA) head Alexis Tsipras, who vehemently opposed the pay cuts, tax hikes and slashed pensions that New Democracy and PASOK supported, refused to join any coalition and said his party would remain in opposition.
With five anti-austerity parties winning 58 percent of the vote, Venizelos said the next government must include their position if it is to have any legitimacy. He blistered Tsipras for not setting aside political differences to join the government. “You can’t have some people choosing the easy position of being in opposition and lying in wait for the government to fail — or rather trying to create the conditions for the government, that is the country, to fail,” Venizelos said. “The most crucial thing for us right now is to achieve the greatest possible range of consensus, and this must happen by tomorrow night (June 19) at the latest,” he said after meeting with Samaras.
After being rejected by Tsipras, media reports said Samaras was likely to ask Democratic Left leader Fotis Kouvelis, whose party finished sixth and has 17 seats, to join with him and PASOK. Kouvelis refused a similar offer after the stalemated May 6 elections which failed to give any party enough seats to form a government and coalition talks collapsed. He said he did not want to be branded as a traitor to the left but said this time it is critical for Greece to have a government, even if he has to temper his criticism of the bailouts.
Kouvelis said he has changed his tune too. “The Democratic Left will support a government if there is an agreement on two basic issues .. the disengagement from the onerous terms of the bailout deal and that the country will remain in the Eurozone,” he told told Reuters after a party meeting to decide the group’s plan. Samaras said he had a “constructive meeting” with Kouvelis and that talks would resume on June 19. Kouvelis was also reported to have spoken with Venizelos.
Greece is surviving on a first rescue package of $152 billion in loans from the Troika of the European Union-International Monetary Fund-European Central Bank (EU-IMF-ECB) which has readied a second for $173 billion but was waiting for the election results as Tsipras had vowed to tear up the deal, a prospect Samaras said could have forced Greece out of the Eurozone of the 17 countries using the euro as a currency.
Both Samaras and Venizelos said they would continue to abide by the Troika’s demands, but toward the end of a six-week campaign that saw Tsipras rise in popularity, they said they, too, wanted changes to the deals they signed and supported. The Troika said any attempt to tinker with reforms could lead to the loans being shut down and demanded another $15 billion in cuts, presenting any coalition with hard choices and fears that if they impose more austerity that Greeks could return to the streets in protests, strike and riots and bring down the government, as they did with the PASOK administration of George Papandreou last year.
Under Greek law, Samaras as the winner, received a mandate from President Karolos Papoulias to form a government within three days or the task would fall to the second-place finisher SYRIZA, although Tsipras said he would pass on the measure. That would hand the baton to Venizelos to try, and if in turn he failed, there would be one last attempt by Papoulias to reach a consensus or Greece would need a third election, a scenario Samaras said would be suicide for the country. New Democracy Member of Parliament Yiannis Tragakis told SKAI TV that he was confident that a ND-PASOK-Democratic Left government, which would have 179 seats, would be formed this week.
Tsipras said he told Samaras that SYRIZA would take on “the role of a strong and responsible opposition” and “intervene in a powerful way,” and added that, ““I didn’t hear from his lips yesterday any reference to renegotiation,” Tsipras said, referring to Samaras’s victory speech in which the New Democracy leader did not reiterate his campaign pledge to try to get better deals for Greece. “I only heard vows to honor commitments, to honor signatures,” Tsipras said. Samaras has changed his mind several times on whether he supports or opposes austerity.
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