After narrowly losing the elections earlier this year and settling for becoming the major opposition party, Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA) leader Alexis Tsipras said if Greece’s uneasy coalition government fails, that his is poised to take over.
“We are the great hope for change,” he told the British newspaper The Guardian in an interview.
Tsipras, who vehemently opposes the austerity measures that have come with bailouts from the country’s international lenders, said, “We don’t want only to stop the catastrophe, the bad medicine … we also want to change Greece – all the positive structural reforms can only be done by us. The political environment was one of the main reasons for the crisis, as was a public sector created to bring in votes.”
The 38-year-old Tsipras emerged from political obscurity earlier this year with his party’s rise – it now shows first in recent polls – and has constantly challenged Prime Minister Antonis Samaras, the New Democracy Conservative leader, and his partners, the PASOK Socialists and tiny Democratic Left, who are often at odds with each other.
SYRIZA is a loose coalition itself, a collection of aligned Leftists philosophies and misfit rebels: Trotskyites, Maoists, environmentalists, academics and those who’ve often been on the fringes of government. While Samaras has succeeded in bringing in a coming round of $69 billion in additional loans from the Troika of the European Union-International Monetary Fund-European Central Bank (EU-IMF-ECB) and crowed that Greece is headed for recovery, Tsipras said he doubts it.
“This government does not have a long lifeline,” he said, dismissing what he said are “dogmatic neo-liberal” political enemies that he said have failed Greece. “Greece is unique. Even after its debt was restructured it continued to go up,” he told the Guardian.
While he said he wants Greece to stay in the Eurozone, he said he’s opposed to the pay cuts, tax hikes, slashed pensions and coming layoffs of scores of thousands of public workers, as well as privatizations of state entities and the sale or lease of state properties, although he offered no solution for bringing in revenues to keep the economy from collapsing and said he doesn’t want to fire any workers or reduce the state budget.
“The problem with the public sector is not one of quantity but quality,” saids Tsipras. “We are at a European average in terms of size.” He added that, “From the first year of the crisis everything we have said has come true. Of course we feel vindicated but it’s not enough. The whole policy has to change.” He said he’s biding his time for now. “We may have narrowly lost the battle, but we have not lost the war,” he said.
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