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| Greek crisis: Syriza rebels break away to form Popular Unity party | Greek crisis: Syriza rebels break away to form Popular Unity party |
| (34 minutes later) | |
| Rebels within Greece’s ruling party, the left-wing Syriza movement led by the prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, have announced they are breaking away to form a separate party called Popular Unity. | Rebels within Greece’s ruling party, the left-wing Syriza movement led by the prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, have announced they are breaking away to form a separate party called Popular Unity. |
| Angry at what they see as a betrayal of the party’s anti-austerity principles, the 25 MPs announced their intention to form a new party in a letter to parliament the day after Tsipras resigned to pave the way for snap elections next month. | |
| Led by the former energy minister, Panagiotis Lafazanis, the new movement will be the third-largest group in the Greek parliament and could conceivably receive a mandate to try to form a new government. | |
| Tsipras announced his resignation in a televised address on Thursday night. He said he felt a “moral obligation” to put Greece’s third international bailout deal and the further swingeing austerity measures it requires in front of the people. Last week he piloted the punishing deal through the Greek parliament, but suffered a major rebellion when nearly one-third of Syriza MPs either voted against the package or abstained. | Tsipras announced his resignation in a televised address on Thursday night. He said he felt a “moral obligation” to put Greece’s third international bailout deal and the further swingeing austerity measures it requires in front of the people. Last week he piloted the punishing deal through the Greek parliament, but suffered a major rebellion when nearly one-third of Syriza MPs either voted against the package or abstained. |
| Related: Greek elections: Alexis Tsipras makes a calculated gamble | |
| Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, the Syriza labour minister, George Katrougalos, said the government needed to “reconfirm its mandate” to implement the third Greek bailout and that the party is “crippled by a number of dissident MPs”. | |
| “This is the essence of democracy, we do not have any problem to ask the people. We do not want to govern against the popular will,” he said, adding that Tspiras and his government were “confident in rightness of our policies and the maturity of the Greek electorate”. | |
| Katrougalos said the government had managed “the best possible deal” when faced with “economic blackmail”. He added that democracy had functioned in Greece, but had failed at the EU level.Asked whether there was a risk in a growth of support for right-wing parties in Greece, he said there was no longer a “typical confrontation between left and right”, saying there was a clear difference between Syriza and “the political parties that support oligarchies”.The party’s success in the forthcoming election was not just a battleground for the country, but a test of whether Europe could “neutralise neo-liberal policies and counter balance recession measures with growth”, he said. | |
| “Greece is going to be become the mirror of the future of Europe, depending on how we implement this difficult arrangement,” he said. “It was never just a Greek issue, it is a more broad confrontation between two visions of Europe, a social one and a neo-liberal one.” |