The elections are "not about which party people want, but about what kind of country we and our children want to live in," Prime Minister Antonis Samaras said on Thursday afternoon at the town hall of Peristeri, northwest of Athens, in a campaign speech.

Greece, Ireland, Spain, Italy and Hungary were the EU member states where poverty and social exclusion increased the most during the crisis, says an EU report.

Two Greek banks have submitted requests to the Bank of Greece for liquidity injections via the Emergency Liquidity Assistance mechanism, according to Kathimerininewspaper.

The newspaper reports that the other two of the four systemic Greek banks are expected to follow suit over the coming days.

The request comes due to the pressing liquidity conditions caused by the outflow of deposits in recent weeks, triggered largely by the perceived political instability in light of the elections. The acquisition of treasury bills forced on the banks by the state has also caused the banks to resort to the ELA  mechanism sooner than expected.

It is not the first time that Greek banks have resorted to the ELA. In 2011 they had also done so due to the outflow of deposits accompanied by repeated credit downgrades of Greece. The latter meant that the bonds held by Greek banks became insufficient collateral for the supply of liquidity by the ECB.

Financing for banks through the ELA mechanism is significantly more expensive than that drawn from the ECB, meaning that banks only resort to it when they face a cash crunch and do not have sufficient collateral to draw liquidity from the ECB.

The repeated issues of T-Bills by the state have exacerbated the liquidity crunch, as Greek banks have been forced to step in and buy T-Bills when they were issued and foreign investors failed to buy them. In November the state drew 2.75 billion in T-Bill issuances and 3.25 billion euros  in December. This January the state has already tapped about 2.7 billion euros, according to the Kathimerini.

The use of the ELA mechanism by Greek banks is subject to approval by the ECB (as the request exceeds a 2 billion euro threshold according to BoG sources). The ECB will discuss the requests made by the two Greek banks next Wednesday.

Bank of Greece sources have reportedly said that there is no cause for alarm. They note that in the May-June period of 2012, ELA funding to Greek banks reached 140 billion euros (by May 2014 ELA financing had been reduced to zero).

The move by the Greek banks comes only a day after the SYRIZA candidate Rachel Makri stunned observers by claiming that the ELA mechanism could be used by Greece to ‘print’ 100 billion euros.