Syriza voted back into office amid mass abstention in Greek election
With over 93 percent of the vote counted early Monday, Greece’s Syriza had returned to power in Sunday’s snap election called last month by the party’s leader, former Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras.
Tsipras returns to office based on a political program that is, at least on the surface, diametrically opposed to the platform upon which Syriza first swept into office in January of this year. Then, the party won the election based on promises to overturn the austerity measures imposed by the European Union and international finance capital as the condition for two previous bailout agreements. Now, Tsipras returns to office to implement the even more onerous austerity measures dictated in the “memorandum of understanding” he accepted as the condition for a third bailout deal.
The election was the third time Greeks have been called to the polls this year. Last January, they elected Tsipras and Syriza based on the widespread belief that they would battle against austerity. Last July, they went to the polls a second time, voting overwhelmingly against austerity in a referendum called by the Syriza government, only to have Tsipras turn around within barely a week and accept the austerity terms dictated by the so-called “troika”—the European Union, International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank.
The repudiation of the popular will expressed in the referendum was only a further step in Syriza’s renunciation of its anti-austerity electoral platform, which began almost the moment it won the election last January. Within less than a month after taking office, it had signed an agreement with the EU pledging not only not to roll back any of the previously imposed austerity measures, but to craft new ones based on the hated memorandum of understanding it previously vowed to defeat.
Read more: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/09/21/gree-s21.html
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