“If you love Greece, help us get rid of Alexis Tsipras and his zombie party,” write former SYRIZA MP and Parliament Speaker in first left-wing government, Zoi Konstantopoulou. In an op-ed posted in UK’s The Guardian, the ex comrade accuses Prime Minister, Alexis Tsipras and her former party that they have “betrayed their people and their principles. They have to go.”
Zoi Konstantopoulou and several party lawmakers, including ministers, left SYRIZA in summer 2015 after the coalition government signed a third bailout with Greece’s European partners.
Excerpt
“Imagine how the British people would view a prime minister elected to end privatisation, and who instead privatised almost every piece of public property; who was elected to serve peace, and who instead facilitated military action against targets in Syria and agreed to sell weapons to countries accused of committing international crimes; who was elected to protect people’s homes, and who stood by while banks seized them, leaving people homeless; who was elected to serve democracy and the independence of his country, and who instead turned it over to the EU, the IMF and the ECB.
This is what Tsipras did to the Greek people.
I was a Syriza MP and president of the Greek parliament during the seven months of the first Syriza government. When Tsipras signed the toxic third memorandum in 2015, I fought hard to protect our parliamentary procedures that he and the troika violated. In spite of continuous pressure, I refused to bend our democratic rules and accept more illegal debt for our people. Together with dozens of other Syriza MPs, I voted against the monstrous agreement.
Tsipras then dissolved parliament prematurely to get rid of me and the dissenting MPs.
Three years on, his capitulation to the troika has proved the disaster many of us predicted. People’s lives have become unbearable. Youth unemployment has become the norm and an estimated 8% of the population has left in search of work. The minimum salary doesn’t pay the bills, and hundreds of thousands of families go without electricity for extended periods of time.
This tragedy began in 2010, but Tsipras’s so-called left government has done everything to prove that it can implement austerity better than its predecessors. It even brags about exceeding the troika’s cruel targets in cuts and taxes.
Listing one after the other the austerity measures the SYRIZA government has implemented and their impact to thousands of Greeks, Konstantopoulou concludes:
As leader of the Course to Freedom party, I have called upon the Greek people to resist the troika and its client Syriza government. We ask for the support of all progressives, including our friends in the Labour party.
Syriza is not the leftwing party it claims to be. It has become a political zombie, crushing every progressive value as it sleepwalks to its electoral demise. Its removal from power is the first step towards restoring democracy in Greece.
full op-ed The Guardian
PS the penultimate paragraph partly replies my question: why should a Greek politician urge Greeks to get rid of the Prime Minister and writes an opinion post in English…
