Greek Parliament rejects SYRIZA censure motion against government. PM: ‘Greece’s economic recovery will begin in 2014 and the country’s ordeal is nearing its end’.

Addressing Parliament in the three-day debate that preceded the final vote, Prime Minister Antonis Samaras and PASOK leader and government Vice-President Evangelos Venizelos interpreted the censure motion as an attempt by SYRIZA leader Alexis Tsipras to forge a unity

between diverging elements within his own party, rather than a serious attempt to topple the government.
In the final speech during the three-day debate, Samaras said that Greece’s economic recovery will begin in 2014 and the country’s ordeal is nearing its end.
Outlining the steps that will lead the country out of the crisis, Samaras predicted that Greece will be ready to return to borrowing from the markets at the end of the next year and promised lighter taxation and improvements to property tax.
“In two years, the primary surpluses will become proper surpluses,” he forecast, underlining that elections will be held in 2016, at the end of the government’s four-year term.
Addressing Tsipras, he asked the main opposition leader what message he was trying to send abroad with his censure motion, underlining that “at the moment that the country is regaining its credibility you are asking for the government to fall.”
He also criticised the main opposition for the protest rally it had organised outside Parliament during the last hours of the censure motion debate, wondering whether SYRIZA was trying to “intimidate Parliament from the street”.
The prime minister defended the government’s economic policy and its actions in relation to the former broadcaster ERT, including the decision to clear the former broadcaster’s building that had been occupied since its closure last June. Samaras said that the interim public broadcaster DT would move in to the facilities at the broadcasting building, which had been occupied “by a handful of trade unionists for five months”.
“Do not poison Parliament with cheap populism; you cannot become main opposition and you want to be a government?” he asked, addressing Tsipras.
“I will not tolerate such behaviour, I will not endure your insults,” he added.
The prime minister emphasised the high cost that Greek people had paid in order to exit the crisis, asking Parliament to reject SYRIZA’s censure motion.
According to Venizelos, the censure motion was an “admission of SYRIZA’s political impasse,” and an “institutionally extreme, politically awkward and national irresponsible” action taken at a sensitive time for Greece. He said it undermined the country on a national and European level at a time when it was seeking to confirm that it had entered the final stage of exiting the bailout memorandums and just before Greece took over the EU presidency, “when our country will have the opportunity to participate in the euro on a basis of institutional equality and not as a poor relation.”
He also noted that at a time when the country should be sending a message of stability and optimism and the democratic parties presenting a united front against Nazism and fascism, SYRIZA’s move had “marshalled a dangerous ‘amalgam’ of disparate opposition forces,” with those supporting the motion including the right-wing Independent Greeks, a ‘reluctant’ Communist Party of Greece and even the far-right Golden Dawn (Chryssi Avgi).
Addressing Parliament in the final hours of a debate, SYRIZA leader Alexis Tsipras dismissed the government’s assurances that there will be no new measures as fake and stressed that elections were the only solution.
“No government can cancel the memorandum. The memorandum can only be cancelled by the people with their vote,” he underlined, promising that a new government backed by the people’s mandate will revoke all the memorandum laws and pass others to boost growth.
In a message addressed to the prime minister, he said that SYRIZA had tabled its censure motion “because you have failed in everything that you promised to do before the elections and in everything that you implemented afterwards.”
The main opposition leader called on Parliament to withdraw its confidence from the government and align itself with the reality prevailing in the country and among the Greek people, ending with a challenge to the prime minister to call early elections.
Independent Greeks’ leader Panos Kammenos noted that this vote of confidence will determine whether this policy that leads to recession, unemployment, poverty will continue or whether we will proceed to the constitutional right of Greek citizens to scrap the memorandum.
“We are called today as Greek MPs sworn to uphold the Constitution and the laws to decide whether to give a vote of censure or a vote of confidence,” Kammenos said, adding that the Democratic Left (DIM.AR) party’s intention to vote “present” meant that the 151 votes that would lead to elections cannot be collected.
Kammenos accused the government of having failed utterly, saying its policy is leading to a deadlock. “This is not just a vote of confidence to government. It is a vote of confidence in the creditors and their institutions,” he said.
Far-right Golden Dawn (Chryssi Avghi) leader Nikos Michaloliakos, in a message from prison where he is held on remand, said he was in favour of the censure motion “against a government which we consider dangerous and which has bowed to foreign interests and power centers, and whose policy has already led our people into misery and our country to sign over its national sovereignty.” Communist Party of Greece (KKE) Parliamentary group president Aleka Papariga, a former leader of the party stressed that KKE did not intend to “lend a helping hand to either the bourgeois parties nor ‘imitation’ solutions [represented by SYRIZA]“.
She noted that the present Parliament was dominated by two basic proposals: the authentic proposal for liberal policies and growth and SYRIZA’s ‘imitation’ proposal of growth supposedly favouring the popular masses.
“However, both are in the same camp. In this growth it is the sharks who will survive,” she added.
Democratic Left (DIM.AR) party leader Fotis Kouvelis said his party will vote “present” during the censure motion while harshly criticising both the government and SYRIZA. He stressed the need for political stability in the country, explaining that “this does not mean the same thing to everyone.”
“We do not want to inflame the climate or impose new measures. We do not invest in disaster. We are against any new measures. Political stability means to make changes to the programme, which even its designers agree has failed,” Kouvelis noted, while adding that political stability also meant “to support the same things within Greece and outside of Greece and not perform for an electoral clientele.”

source: ΑΜΝΑ