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Athens Macedonian News Agency: News in English, 15-07-26
CONTENTS
[01] Rebel Left Platform leader Lafazanis sticks to hardline stance in
'Real News' interview
[02] Former minister says government being led to 'full cancellation of
SYRIZA's programme'
[01] Rebel Left Platform leader Lafazanis sticks to hardline stance in
'Real News' interview
ANA-MPA -- Sticking to his guns, the leader of ruling SYRIZA's rebel
'Left Platform' Panagiotis Lafazanis insisted in an interview published
by 'Real News' on Sunday that the government would lose support within
the party if it continued down a pro-memorandum path.
"If the government becomes irretrievably identified with new and old
memorandums and the policies that implement these, it will find itself
opposed not just by me but by the great majority in SYRIZA, almost all the
democratic, progressive people of the Left," he said. Lafazanis said that
he supports the government to implement the 'radical programme' on which
SYRIZA was elected and respond to the result of the referendum, but not
to sign and implement new memorandums. "My own position and insistence
from the start was to promptly prepare Greece, first of all politically,
for all outcomes - even for that of an exit from the eurozone, if it
was met with a 'wall' and demands for capitulation," he said. In an
interview with 'Free Sunday', meanwhile, Lafazanis also noted that the
Left Platform was the initiator of SYRIZA as a unifying force of the
Left and supported SYRIZA at a time when others, many of which were
not fanatical supporters of the memorandum, were trying to break it up.
He also disputed that an exit from the euro would be disastrous, noting
that with the right progressive policies a national currency could help
increase domestic production and employment.
[02] Former minister says government being led to 'full cancellation of
SYRIZA's programme'
ANA-MPA -- The government is being led to a complete cancellation of
SYRIZA's programme, former alternate labour minister and SYRIZA MP
Dimitris Stratoulis said in an interview with the newspaper "Epochi"
published on Sunday.
"What we believe will have from now on, if the government insists and
signs the third memorandum in August, is that it will be led, through
the [agreement's] neoliberal-style content and the harsh and humiliating
supervision of the quartet now of creditors, to a complete cancellation of
SYRIZA's programme and policy statements," Stratoulis said. He stressed
that the government must extricate itself from the "deadly and heinous
blackmail of its lenders and follow another path, fully harmonised with
the No delivered by the people and youth in the recent referendum that
it had itself and rightly called." Stratoulis said that major mistakes
were made in the course of the negotiations, including the signature
of the February 20 agreement and the payment of 8.0 billion euros in
obligations to the lenders at a time when no financing was forthcoming
on the part of the creditors.
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