Tsipras says Greece is in final stretch before exit from bailouts
ΣΧΕΤΙΚΑ ΑΡΘΡΑ
Greece is in the final stretch before its exit from the bailouts after almost eight years, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said at the opening of the two-day meeting of SYRIZA’s central committee on Friday, noting that this will be a crucial milestone for the country.
“The day when Greece will return to a state of normalcy within the institutional framework of the European Union and the Eurozone is dawning,” he said.
“I have repeated many times that the exit from the memoranda is not the end of the road. But a crucial, necessary and historic milestone,” he said, adding that “the overall effort does not concern only the present but also the future.”
Tsipras said that for the country to exit the memoranda, it needed a government “with vigor and credibility, not a delegation of the spoiled elite, whose only criterion was the preservation of its own prerogatives, and those of the oligarchy it represented and still represents”.
“Today, the choices we made in our struggle, are being vindicated, along with the decisions of the Greek people,” he added.
Commenting on the issue of taxation after the bailout era, he said it is in the government’s priorities to examine ways to ease the tax burden for lower and middle incomes once the economy has rebounded – an event that will increase tax revenues.
He criticized the main opposition New Democracy for its “unprecedented scaremongering propaganda” adding that the party’s plans to destabilize the country are defeated “one after another”.
Tsipras then referred to the talks between Greece and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) over the name dispute, saying that the government will continue to work “to achieve the best possible in a negotiation that is now starting” and expressed his belief that developments will vindicate the government.
“The Greek position is clear: We claim with determination the resolution of the issue,” he said, adding that “resolution means a mutually accepted composite name for every use” that will leave no room for irredentism and ahistorical demands.
The prime minister said that a window of opportunity is opening so that Greece can finally resolve a decades-old problem that the country has been burdened with since 1992, when the then foreign minister and later prime minister Antonis Samaras of New Democracy “chose to build his personal political career instead of contributing in resolving the problem, as national interest required” and accused the party of irresponsibility on the issue, saying leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis “will be forced very soon, to choose a position”.
ANA-MPA