Main opposition New Democracy (ND) leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis on Sunday reiterated his call for Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and “his coterie” to step down as soon as possible, essentially calling for snap elections in the country.
He spoke on the last day of ND’s 10th party convention, held in an exhibition center near the Athens airport.
“Let’s get rid of this government of the incompetent. We are ready to fulfill our mission; we will not betray the citizens’ trust,” he told party lawmakers, delegates and cadres.
Mitsotakis and his center-right party have ramped up the criticism and pressure on the ruling coalition – leftist SYRIZA and its small rightist-populist party (AN.EL) – amid the looming Parliament debate on tax hikes and pension cuts worth 5.4 billion euros until 2018, a nearly completed package worked out in now delayed negotiations with Greece’s institutional lenders.
Besides the draft bill, the government faces the obstacle of compiling yet an additional list of measures worth 3.6 billion euros in a “contingency package”, set to be activated if goals in the first package aren’t met. The latter is the most recent demand by lenders and was approved at Friday’s Eurogroup meeting despite initial resistance by the leftist Greek government.
Greek voters went to the polls now less than three times in 2015: a snap election triggered in late January when the then opposition, mostly SYRIZA, declined to vote for the majority’s candidate for the entireely ceremonial position of president of the republic; an unprecedented referendum on an agreement offered at the time by creditors in early July 2015; and finally, another snap election in September after the third memorandum was signed.
