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posted by LaminatorX on Saturday August 22 2015, @09:04PM   Printer-friendly
from the Vote-Diomede! dept.

The Guardian reports

Seven months after he was elected on a promise to overturn austerity, the Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, has announced he is stepping down to pave the way for snap elections next month.

As the debt-crippled country received the first tranche of a punishing new €86bn (£61bn) bailout, Tsipras said on Thursday he felt "a moral obligation to place this deal in front of the people, to allow them to judge ... both what I have achieved, and my mistakes".

The 41-year-old Greek leader is still popular with voters for having at least tried to stand up to the country's creditors and his leftwing Syriza party is likely to be returned to power in the imminent general election, which government officials told Greek media was most likely to take place on 20 September.

Time magazine notes

It's one of the most basic rules of electoral politics: Keep your campaign promises or you will lose the support of your voters--but Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has deftly managed to skirt that rule. On Thursday, when he announced that he will resign and call snap elections for September 20, Tsipras wagered that voters would stay behind him regardless of the fact that he has failed to keep most of his core campaign pledges. And he is probably right.

At the end of July--after he had abandoned hopes of shielding the Greek welfare state from further cuts and austerity measures--Tsipras' approval rating was still at a comfortable 60% in all the major polls. Even now he is comfortably ahead of any other political leader in the country, and his move on Thursday to call elections is intended to lock in that support.

The prime minister will be replaced for the duration of the short campaign by the president of Greece's supreme court, Vassiliki Thanou-Christophilou--a vocal bailout opponent--as head of a caretaker government.

In related news, in the first move to sell off Greece's public infrastructure, as required by the terms of the third bailout, New Media outlet enikos indicates that German corporation Fraport doesn't think it has squeezed the Greek government quite hard enough yet and wants an even better deal than €1.2B to take over Greece's airports.

While opposed to asset sales when elected in January, Tsipras reversed his pre-election promise in order to seal a bailout deal in July. The shift has split the ruling Syriza party with the prospect of new elections as early as September. Tsipras is planning a confidence vote after 44 of his lawmakers voted against him when the bailout deal was approved last week.

...and this was after a public referendum July 5 where 61 percent of the Greek electorate said NO AUSTERITY.


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  • (Score: 1) by chucky on Saturday August 22 2015, @10:25PM

    by chucky (3309) on Saturday August 22 2015, @10:25PM (#226420)

    Europe who?

    (I have to help myself with somebody else's words: "We hear a lot about somebody called Europe. In the past we had somebody called Party. Got taken care of everything, decided everything, sometimes his iron fist fell on somebody, but nobody has ever seen him nor went for a beer with him." This is how EU feels nowadays.)