Alexis Tsipras, Greece’s far-left opposition leader, said the Greek government will no longer have a mandate to run the country if his Syriza party finishes first in May’s European parliament election.
He predicted that national elections would be held before the end of next year.
Mr Tsipras, who has vowed to scrap the country’s €172bn bailout agreement with international lenders, said anger in Greece has grown since last year’s national election when Syriza twice came close to becoming the country’s biggest party in parliament – falling just short of the centre-right New Democracy party of Antonis Samaras, now prime minister.
The Syriza leader said: “In this [European] election, people will vote without fear, without the fear of the campaign [accusations] our opponents made in 2012, that if Syriza comes to power everything will be a desert.”
“For the government, it will be a true disaster. The fear of Mr Samaras is that it will be difficult on the next day to continue to implement this [bailout] programme without people supporting it.”He said in an interview in English with the Financial Times, Reuters and BBC: “I believe Syriza will win the election by a long distance, and I’m afraid also that Golden Dawn will also increase their forces,” he added, referring to the neo-Nazi party that has 18 seats in the national parliament.
The prospect of Mr Tsipras becoming prime minister sent shockwaves through the EU last summer after Greek and European leaders warned that his promise to break the terms of the bailout would lead to a Greek default and exit from the eurozone. Recent opinion polling has Syriza and New Democracy neck and neck with each getting about a quarter of the vote.
While Mr Tsipras repeated his vow to “cancel” the bailout terms, the opposition leader insisted that he would not abandon the rescue entirely, saying he believed international lenders and other eurozone countries would provide significant debt relief as part of a renegotiation rather than risk Greece’s collapse.
Mr Tsipras said he had discussed additional debt relief, which would involve eurozone lenders accepting large losses on their current bailout loans, with Wolfgang Schäuble, Germany’s finance minister, and acknowledged that “Mr Schäuble has different ideas”.
But the Syriza leader said he could rally allies in other highly-indebted eurozone countries to force a eurozone-wide agreement akin to a 1953 pact that restructured much of Germany’s postwar sovereign debt.
“We don’t believe it’s a fight between Greece and Germany, because if it was something like that, it would be very difficult for us,” he said. “Maybe it will be a fight between the European periphery and the countries that have three As in their credit ratings. We have an intention to create alliances in the EU, for example with Italy, with Spain, with Portugal.”
Although he acknowledged that convincing the German-led creditor countries to support debt relief would be politically difficult, Mr Tsipras said he believed he could convince German voters it was in their interest, since without lower debt levels and more economic aid, Greece will never be able to raise money on its own through the bond market.
“We say to the taxpayers of Germany: for a long time you paid money for Greek banks, not Greek people, and you pay money in programmes that are programmed to fail,” he said. “You have to stop this procedure. If you continue this procedure, you will never stop paying.”
Mr Tsipras added that a stand-off between Athens and the troika of international lenders [EU, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund], which has delayed Greece’s next aid payment for months,proves that Greece could survive without bailout funds for an extended period if he were to withdraw from the current deal, especially since Greece is taking in more tax revenue than it is spending, if debt payments are excluded.
“If you remember, they said that if Syriza wins, we will not have money. Syriza didn’t win: Samaras won, but they also don’t have money.”
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