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Alexis Tsipras defends Greek bailout deal in TV election debate Alexis Tsipras and rivals trade barbs in televised election debate
(about 2 hours later)
Former Gree k prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, has acknowledged that his government has not delivered on all of its promises, but vowed to keep fighting austerity as he faced off against challengers in a televised election debate. Greece’s political leaders traded barbs in a televised debate billed as potentially decisive for the general election on 20 September.
Tsipras, who is locked in a neck-and-neck race with his conservative rival Vangelis Meimarakis of the New Democracy party, said he had placed the “interests of the Greek people” above all else when he agreed an unpopular third bailout deal with international creditors in July. Opinion polls have put the leftist former governing party Syriza and the main opposition party, the centre-right New Democracy, neck and neck – far from the easy victory the Syriza leader, Alexis Tsipras, had envisaged when he called the election.
The €86bn (£62.8bn) rescue package prevented a Greek exit from the eurozone but demands tough reforms in return for the cash, sparking a rebellion within Tsipras’s leftist Syriza party, which came to power in January on an anti-austerity platform. Tsipras, who has argued that a fresh mandate is vital to implementing the unpopular €86bn (£63bn) bailout deal he secured for Greece, began the debate conceding “excesses and mistakes”.
Tsipras, 41, admitted that his government had not fulfilled all its commitments but pledged to “keep up the fight” against austerity if he is re-elected on 20 September. “We waged war but made a compromise,” he said, insisting that during his seven months in office his once anti-austerity party had put up a tough defence in negotiations with the EU and International Monetary Fund.
Attacking Syriza leader’s economic record, Meimarakis, 61, called the bailout “painful” and said that, unlike Syriza, his party would be capable of attracting investment to rebuild the country’s crippled economy. The compromise “may have been painful but it has positive points for the Greek people too”, he said.
The president of the European commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, earlier on Wednesday said whoever wins the 20 September vote must respect the terms of the huge bailout deal. Tsipras’s once invincible popularity has been dented by his somersault on the issue of austerity – the pill Greeks have had to swallow in return for the biggest bailout in global financial history to avert default and remain in the eurozone.
“I expect them to stand by their word and deliver on the agreement – whoever governs,” Juncker told the European parliament in Strasbourg. As the debate got under way, Panagiotis Lafazanis, Tsipras’s former comrade – who broke ranks with him to establish his own “genuinely” anti-austerity party last month – accused the prime minister of hypocrisy in embracing measures he had once so vehemently opposed.
A total of seven party leaders took part in the televised debate, the first in the country since 2009. “There are no good or bad memoranda,” he said referring to the accords outlining the onerous terms of the bailouts Greece has signed up to with creditors. “They all lead to catastrophe.”
Though the economy featured heavily, it was the migrant crisis that drew some of the most heated exchanges. He argued that a return to the drachma, the former national currency, would not only reinvigorate exports but kickstart the development, employment and productivity the country’s shattered economy needed.
Meimarakis accused Tsipras’s government of a lack of foresight that has led to an overwhelmed Greece struggling to cope with a massive influx of migrants and refugees on its islands. He stressed the need for Greece to “guard its borders”. In a pre-election campaign that has shown all the signs of being a dead heat, the late-night discussion was eagerly awaited by an electorate who – while worn down by the deprivations of austerity and the drama of their country’s debt crisis – are still looking for answers.
Tsipras for his part said he had pushed the European Union to take action on the crisis and warned his countrymen against a populist response to a humanitarian emergency that has left “three-year-old children dead on the shores of the Aegean”, a reference to the Syrian boy Alan Kurdi who was found dead on a Turkish beach last week. The election, the fifth in as many years, could decide the country’s future with the international creditors that have kept it afloat.
“Usually elections are determined long before the actual vote,” said the political scientist Dimitris Keridis. “But this time the race is very close and a debate could ultimately make all the difference.”
The latest polls show Syriza half a percentage point ahead of New Democracy.
A poll on Wednesday indicated that 26.5% of the electorate would support Syriza, compared with 26% for New Democracy. Undecided voters have ranged in successive polls from 13% to 25%.
Vangelis Meimarakis, the New Democrat leader who has been widely credited with rallying the party, used the debate to ram home the message that national consensus was the only way forward for a nation forced to negotiate the tough demands of creditors.
Without no party likely to win the majority necessary to form a government, several smaller parties could hold the key to power.
With Golden Dawn not participating in the debate – on the grounds that no other party will talk to it, despite persistent poll ratings revealing the neofascists as the country’s third biggest political force – other leaders played the discussion for all they could.
Fofi Gennimata, elevated to the head of Pasok as Greece’s only female political leader, said the centre-left party could be a useful force in a coalition government.
Tsipras, she said, had pulled off a world first leading Greece to “a new memorandum” even though it had by dint of hard work achieved a primary surplus. “If there was a Golden Raspberry award for the economy, Tsipras would win it,” she said.