Tsipras Visits Papoulias & Requests Snap Elections
- Written by E.Tsiliopoulos
As promised during the campaign, opposition leader Alexis Tsipras visited the President of the Republic. He was supposed to make a motion for early elections based on last night's election results. He did, only his tone was not exactly demanding.
The SYRIZA leader said that national elections should be called “as soon as possible”, in the most normal mode, because there is a huge gap between what people have voted for and parliament correlations.
Tsipras repeated his argument from last night that if the elections were national instead of European, with these results the two coalition partners would have 94 out of the 152 seats they enjoy today, so they would lack the votes necessary to pass anti-popular bills. He added that last night was not just a clear SYRIZA win by 4 points, but also the coalition partners lost more than 11 points from their power in the 2012 general election.
Tsipras upped the ante in his attack on the Prime minister, cautioning him to stay away from three actions: enforce new memorandum oriented austerity measures or privatizations, appoint a new Bank of Greece governor and elect a new president of the Republic on this parliament's majority.
Speaking to the president in front of the TV cameras at the beginning of their meeting, Tsipras mentioned that despite the terrorism attempted by some saying in case SYRIZA wins this election there would be “earthquakes, starvation and floods”, today is a beautiful day.
President Papoulias pointed out that the rise of the far right and euroskeptisism in this election is an alarming factor, with Tsipras replying that Europe has to change policies in order to address this danger for European democracy.
