Samaras Will Boot New Democracy MP for Tweeting Criticism

ATHENS – A former Deputy Labour Minister under the ruling New Democracy party who stepped down last month to protest Prime Minister Antonis Samaras’ decision not to try to renegotiate harsh terms of bailouts with international lenders as he had pledged now faces expulsion from the party for sending a Twitter message criticizing the coalition government’s giving-in to $14.16 billion in new cuts.
Nikos Nikolopoulos wrote a series of tweets that included the message to his followers that “The strategic dead-end is obvious.” He added, “The hope of renegotiation was just a dream. What can a breathless people expect? Mercy or punishment from the Troika?” referring to the European Union-International Monetary Fund-European Central Bank (EU-IMF-ECB) that is putting up $152 billion in rescue loans. A second bailout, for $173 billion, has been delayed until the government imposes more of the same kind of pay cuts, tax hikes and slashed pensions that came with the first.
The austerity measures have deepened a recession, now in its fifth year, put nearly 1.1 million people out of work, shrunk the economy by 7 percent and is closing 1,000 businesses a week, prompting Nikolopoulos to also write, “Recession for the Guinness Book of World Records. Our country has more consecutive years of recession than any other in the world. The country just can’t take any more.”
Samaras, who in the past has booted members who don’t follow his orders and given him their vote, summarily dismissed him from the New Democracy Parliamentary group and also said the former minister would have to appear before a disciplinary body that would decide whether he would be ejected from the party as well.
Sources close to Samaras told the newspaper Kathimerini that since the day Nikolopoulos, an MP in the Achaia area of the Peloponnese, resigned from his post, he has systematically trying to get himself thrown out of the party. He resigned from the Labor Ministry on July 9, citing disappointment with the government’s decision not to force the Troika to re-open talks. “The sole reason for my resignation is my personal conviction that the issue of renegotiating with the Troika, as well as the correction of significant distortions in labor, pension, social security and welfare issues, should have been emphatically put on the table from the start,” he wrote in his resignation letter.
Samaras has waffled on whether he would renegotiate with the Troika, first saying that he would when he was campaigning ahead of the June 17 elections, then saying after he was elected that he wouldn’t. Then, when his coalition partners, PASOK Socialist leader Evangelos Venizelos and Democratic Left chief Fotis Kouvelis, pressed him, Samaras said he would renegotiate.
But when Troika officials came to Athens at the end of July, he said that he wouldn’t and that Greece would press ahead with $14.16 in cuts that will be revealed at the end of the month but reportedly are again aimed at workers, pensioners and the poor. Venizelos, who as finance minister in a previous shaky New Democracy-PASOK government doubled income and property taxes and taxed the poor, said the measures have unfairly hit the most vulnerable members of Greek society but that he would continue to support them for now.
Public figures have found there are perils in the era of social media. Last month, Greek Olympian triple jumper Voula Papachristou was kicked off the team just before the start of the 2012 London Games for re-tweeting a racist message from the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party in Parliament about African immigrants in Greece being “homemade food” for mosquitoes carrying the West Nile virus.