Democratic Left says 'no' to ND-PASOK coalition, more elections
“Democratic Left will not take part in the New Democracy-PASOK coalition, which is being suggested,” he told an audience in Chania, Crete, on Friday. “We will not give a democratic, left alibi to this coalition, which some are promoting.” Kouvelis said that Democratic Left’s two conditions for working with another party after the elections are that it supports Greece’s participation in the eurozone and the gradual “decoupling” from the EU-IMF loan agreement. Kouvelis said that if Democratic Left gets enough votes on Sunday to be among the top three parties, it will attempt to form a government, if it is given the chance to do so. “We have said from the start that we are not indifferent about the next government’s policies, nor about the possibility of the country remaining ungoverned and having to go through repeated elections,” he said. “We want the country to have a progressive government. If we are asked by the president to form a government, we will appeal to progressive forces based on a specific policy program,” added the veteran leftist.
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News in from Athens where Helena Smith, our correspondent, has the low-down on reaction to yesterday's suggestions that divided Greece could be heading to a new round of elections within the year.
Helena writes:
Helena writes:
and....Officials in Athens' interim government have debunked the notion that Greece is necessarily headed to a new round of elections – even if the prospect of a massive anti-austerity protest vote has drastically reduced the possibility of any party winning an overhaul majority in the 300-seat parliament. One senior official in the left-right coalition administration said the conservative New Democracy party was deliberately spreading the rumour in the hope of swinging undecided voters on the eve of the poll. An unprecedented 30% of Greece's near 5 million-strong electorate has indicated it has yet to decide which way to vote. As much as 60% has suggested it will back parties virulently opposed to stringent belt-tightening being demanded of Greece in return for rescue loans from the EU and IMF."What is the rationale of holding new elections if they are close to 150 seats?" the insider asked. "The fact of the matter is that they [New Democracy] will come under enormous pressure to form a government [from within Greece and the EU]."Sunday's vote is costing the debt-stricken country €25m. But Helena's contact denies that Athens simply can't afford to keep holding elections:"All the polls," he said, referring to those being conducted, privately, given the official ban on surveys 15 days before elections, "have shown that voters don't want another round [of elections]."High-ranking cadres in the socialist Pasok party, busily preparing for tonight's send-off demonstration in Syntagma square, brushed off the suggestion as absurd. The EU hadn't wanted the election in the first place. "Our partners aren't going to wait for us to make up our minds forever. There are time-tables to be kept, work to do, reforms to be passed" said one.
Even officials in New Democracy appeared to backtrack this morning. True, Chyrsanthos Lazarides, a senior aide to conservative leader Antonis Samaras, had raised the possibility on on TV but he had done so "within the framework of a much wider discussion" said the party's press office. "It was said very clearly, within the framework of a much larger discussion, that if the case arises of having a government for only three to five months [because it is so weak] then perhaps it is preferable that we have a repeat elections," said the official.
Latest polls reportedly show the centre-right New Democrats capturing between 28 to 30%. Support for Pasok is anywhere between 17 and 24 %. Although voters appear to be rallying around the two main parties in rural areas, where their traditional support base remains strongest, garnering enough votes to win a majority is very much touch and go. New Democracy would need to secure another 5% to win a majority.
"But," said another official, "parties that don't manage to cross the 3% threshold will not be counted [in the entire vote] which obviously will raise [the front-runner's] percentage.'A good point that I neglected to mention in Thursday's Q&A with readers."A lot of us are worried but we've also become philosophical," said the government insider. "Even Syriza [the populist left group whose popularity rates have risen radically in recent days] is toning down its anti-European, anti-memorandum rhetoric. No party is going to risk not having the money to pay civil servants' wages and pensions. Whatever party, or parties, are in government will make the necessary moves to keep the [rescue] funds coming."
The President of the Athens Chamber of Commerce has called for Greece's next government to attempt to renegotiate its bailout package after Sunday's election.
Costas Michalos said Athens should tell its international partners that the programme of cuts, austerity and reform needs to be changed.
and how does Greece handle these looming debt issues ...."We need a government that is representative of at least 50 percent of the Greek electorate, even the smaller parties need consensus. We should renegotiate parts of the [bailout] package as we need to increase revenue and growth," said Costas Michalos, President of the Athens Chamber of Commerce.
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The socialist PASOK and the New Democracy parties have both supported the bailout deal and its stringent conditions. The smaller parties are hoping to ride on the back of a wave of discontent that has swept the country in recent months, with some asking for a renegotiation of the terms of the bailout and some even calling for an exit from the euro itself.
http://www.lawrencegmcdonald.com/eu-crisis-key-dates-to-watch/
8th May: Greece €1.6 billion debt matures
15th May Greece resolution of foreign bond holdouts
18th May: Greece €8 billion debt matures
http://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2012/05/04/greek-elections-how-the-papademos-government-forgot-to-send-any-tax-bills/
GREEK ELECTIONS: How the Papademos Government ‘forgot’ to send any tax bills
The real Greek tax bill is lost in the post
On April 18th last, The Slog led with an IMF report inadvertantly showing the draconian new tax measures being set up for after the Greek elections this coming Sunday.
Nobody in the Western MSM went near the story, but the better-informed Greeks have since been voting with their feet by leaving the Pasok and New Democracy Parties in their droves.
Yesterday leading Greek newspaper Ekathimerini healdined with a piece entitled ‘Tax avalanche to follow elections’. This is further bad news for the pro-Troika Parties, who have been trying to rubbish such reports (ever since the first revelations nearly three weeks ago) with risible talk about ‘unfortunate delays’ and ‘forgetfulness’.
But Ekathimerini this time uses Ministerial leaks to dish the dirt on how calculated the ‘delay’ has been in trying to hoodwink the electors:
‘A top Finance Ministry official told Kathimerini that the delivery of the ETAK slips was put off following an intervention from the higher echelons of the government.
“We were even forced to withdraw all ETAK data from the TAXISnet electronic system in order to prevent people that visited the tax authorities for any other purpose from having to pay their ETAK,” the same official added. (The ETAK is a Single Property Tax still delayed from 2009.)’
The additional taxes will have to be processed as early as possible in order to meet the Troika’s omnivorous needs. Probably the first tax clearance slips will be sent for income tax payment at the end of July. Those slips will also include the solidarity tax and the profession fee, which this year will soar by a massive 66% to 500 euros from 300 euros last year.
By then, of course, the eurozone might be in such deep doo-doo, those tax bills will be irrelevant – but don’t hold your breath. Just as pro-EU politicians ban elections, ignore elections, postpone elections, redo elections, and put off tax bills until after elections, they can do precisely the same via Mario Draghi’s increasingly junk-strewn ECB with budgets and bailouts. The problem becomes real only when an election fails to vote in a coalition prepared to go along with this sadistic madness….and this now looks increasingly likely in Greece.
I still can’t grasp what bit of this potential disaster for the eurocrats the MSM doesn’t get. I was accused by a media acquaintance earlier this week of “becoming an anorak about Greek election politics”. Apart from Jeremy Hunt’s lies, Spain’s impending meltdown, and the likelihood of two fingers being stuck up to the EU in Athens come next Monday, I can’t think of anything more apposite to write about.
There is a global misapprehension at large in 2012, and it is this: that knowing the latest news in a 24/7 world means you’re well informed. It does not. A flood of hits comes to The Slog when something sensationally unreported elsewhere comes to light. But the best revelations (yesterday’s post on Jeremy Hunt, for example) get lower hits and attract new readers – who stay long after the news-junkies have left.
Earlier this week I posted a piece about our own ‘leaders’ being completely out of touch on the real effect of falling incomes and rising costs as austerity bites. Precisely the same lesson should be read to the Troikanauts: have they worked out yet that greasing palms on the end of Grecian arms doesn’t butter the parsnips? Does Christine Lagarde know what a pint of milk costs? Does she know which way is up? Does she know the what the capital of Paraguay is?
Footnote: Had a greater degree of Greek debt been forgiven a year earlier, and Greece evicted from the eurozone, both sides in the affray would now be financially and market-sentiment better off. The Bank of Greece this week forecast a 3% drop in tourism for 2012 (Greece’s biggest earner), whereas if the country went back to the Drachma, holidaymakers would be flooding there in their millions. All such things should be borne in mind (Pound or no Pound) when this sort of nonsense starts to happen here.
http://www.athensnews.gr/portal/1/55351
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1. NEW DEMOCRACY RALLIES Addressing his party's final rally before Sunday's election, the New Democracy leader Antonis Samaras on Thursday called for a "strong mandate to change everything", reiterating his message that "Greece can and shall manage". "I don't want to cogovern with Pasok," Antonis Samaras told thousands of supporters waving national flags at the rally, held outside the Zappeio Mansion. "If we formed a government with Pasok we would be hostage to its policies, afraid at every step that the coalition may break up," he said. As regards his party's proposals for recover, he said: "Our plan is simple, only five words: Recovery, social cohesion, growth, security." In a clear attempt to undercut parties further on the right, Samaras referred to undocumented migrants as "the tyrants of Greek society", vowing to intensify moves to expel them.
2. SYRIZA WANTS POWER Calling on voters to endorse the idea of a leftwing government, the Radical Left Coalition (Syriza) leader Alexis Tsipras said on Thursday that "nobody and nothing any more can stop a people determined to change their fate. He told the final election rally of his broad coalition that "a holy alliance of old Greece had united against the possibility of leftwing government" and called on undecided voters that previously backed Pasok and New Democracy to support Syriza.
3. COUNTRY NEEDS US Sunday's elections are not about judging parties or personalities but "but the future of the Greek people", the Pasok leader told a party rally on Rhodes on Thursday. Evangelos Venizelos said the outcome of the vote would be determined by the undecided voters and appealed to those who backed his party in 2009 to stay the course. Antonis Samaras' insistence on an absolute majority showed how much out of touch he was with the problems the country is facing, Venizelos continued, adding that the anti-memorandum parties would lead to the "Albania-isation" of Greece.
4. COST OF VOTING Sunday's election will cost taxpayers 50 million euros, considerably less than the 83 million in 2009, the interior ministry announced on Thursday. It said the savings were made thanks to cuts in election staff: 3,296 ministry and local government staff instead of 7,898 at the last general election, while 9,028 people will make up the remaining poll staff, down from 16,424. The figures do not include government funds for political parties and money used to subsidise political campaigns and airtime on television, a programme that was expanded for this election to provide additional support to for parties that have not been previously elected to parliament.
5. ELECTION NIGHT The country won't have a reliable view of how Sunday's vote has gone until about 11pm, Singular Logic, the company that runs the computerised results system said on Thursday. By that point, the company believes, over half of the votes will have been counted. It had previously said that 50 percent of the count would have been completed by 9.30pm. It noted that a clear picture on share of each party's vote will emerge relatively quickly, but that it won't be until late that borderline parties will learn whether they have cleared the 3-percent hurdle to enter parliament.
6. MANDATORY HIV TESTING The health ministry said on Thursday that the public health officials, in association with the police, will step up mandatory testing for HIV on prostitutes and drug addicts, using recently enacted legislation. The regulations also allow forced tests on social groups deemed vulnerable to infectious diseases, such as undocumented migrants. In a statement, the ministry admitted that the first warning signs that HIV as well as other infectious diseases were on the increase were apparent as far back as February 2010. Since then, mobile units from the Centre for the Control and Prevention of Diseases (Keelpno) has offered voluntary testing to more than 24,000 individuals and found 85 men and women who tested HIV positive.
7. PHONE-TAPPING CASE REOPENS The remains of 39-year-old Vodafone Hellas executive Costas Tsalikidis, who was found hanged at his Athens apartment just days after a major phone-tapping scandal involving the company came to light, were exhumed on Thursday. The exhumation was ordered after a prosecutor decided to reopen the casein order to examine the circumstances surrounding Tsalikidis’ death. Tsalikidis' family has rejected an earlier verdict of suicide. Among the phones tapped were those belonging to then prime minister Kostas Karamanlis, ministers and other prominent individuals.
8. POLICE VICTIM COMPENSATED A 29-year-old Cypriot man has been awarded €300,000 in damages following his videotaped beating by plainclothed police officers during a 2006 demonstration in Thessaloniki. An appeals court awarded Avgoustinos Dimitriou the damages from the state, upholding an earlier decision, ruling that officers involved in the incident had used excessive force. The incident occurred while Dimitriou was a student in the city and was taking part in an annual demonstration, and left him with a fractured nose and bruises all over his body.
9. LADIES' DAY Cat charity Nine Lives is holding a ladies' day on Saturday, from noon to 6pm, at the Athens Sports Bar, 3-5 Veikou St, Acropolis. This fun, fundraising event is for all the family and the events, activities and attractions include a fashion show of new and nearly-new clothes, including designer pieces, manicures, nail art & lashes, hairstyling, Indian head massage, yoga and belly-dancing miniclasses, kids' corner, a raffle and new and nearly new stalls selling clothes, bags, accessories, jewellery, cosmetics & make-up cases, books, gifts and much more. Drinks, snacks and meals will be available at the bar and fish cafe. For more details, email ninelivesgreece@gmail.com, "like" Nine Lives on Facebook or follow them on Twitter.
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