PM Tsipras Launches Debate on Government Policy Statements in Parliament

Launching a three-day discussion on the government's policy statements that will culminate in a vote of confidence on Tuesday night, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras on Sunday unveiled to the Greek Parliament a plan that was in a large part based on the platform that SYRIZA had presented before the elections. 

At the same time, he underscored a determination to confront the pathogenic and dysfunctional systems at home, including a "regime of political and economic power that in recent years has sunk our country into crisis and discredited it internationally."

The prime minister repeated that the negotiation with Greece's European partners must culminate in an agreement for the reduction of the debt, since the government programme would not be able to contend with the deinvestment and recessionary spiral if the Greek economy "continues to be squeezed in the vice of an unsustainable debt and the obligation to achieve unreasonable, impossible and groundless primary surpluses, which do not leave any fiscal margins for a growth respite."

"Greece wants to pay its debt - and if our partners also want this, they must come to negotiate. The problem of the Greek debt is not an issue of a technical nature but of political choices. So long as our partners insist on austerity, the problem of the debt will get worse. If we agree that the solution is political, then a solution will be found," he said.