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Athens News Agency: News in English, 08-10-02
CONTENTS
[01] Papandreou meets French Socialist MP Royal
[01] Papandreou meets French Socialist MP Royal
Main opposition PASOK party leader and Socialist International (SI)
President George Papandreou hosted a working luncheon for French
Socialist deputy and former presidential candidate Segolene Royal in
Athens on Thursday saying afterwards that the socialists will not
accept the global credit crisis being placed on the shoulders of midde
class people and the less privileged, adding that "a struggle will be
waged, initiatives will be taken and there will be close cooperation
with Segolene and the socialists of Europe with these aims."
Papandreou said that the socialists have already taken initiatives
which will be continued at international and European level so that
"there shall be new policies, market functioning rules and protection
for the income of the average and low-salary families."
Royal said that the present crisis "proves that the values of the Left
are being mobilised today to give it a solution."
She further said that "policy must be ahead of economic logic, in the
need for a fairer distribution of wealth and, mainly, in a monetary
system that will be at the service of the economy and in an economy
that will be at the service of human development."
Royal went on to say that "we are ultimately realising, in other words,
that all are appropriating socialist values and the values of the Left
for their own benefit. We are watching in France even the President of
the Republic speaking a leftist language. We suddenly see even Mr.
(U.S. President George W.) Bush, who was the most hostile towards state
intervention, nationalising banks and finding, from one moment to the
next, 700 billion dollars, when he could not find them to relieve the
world food crisis."
Lastly, she said that the words of the socialists will have proved to
be beneficial "only if we want, indeed, these words to become deeds and
the crisis to be beneficial, meaning to allow an in-depth change both
of policies and of the system and not an offhand means that will merely
allow the reproduction of the system."
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