Its President, Nikos Pappas, began his placement in the Parliamentary Group of SYRIZA PS from climate change and the devastating fires, describing it as “a strategic choice of the ND not to invest in prevention”.
At the time of the confrontation, “if the government asks for respect, we respond”, noted Mr. Pappas, underlining, however, that “we have heard Mr. Mitsotakis brag about preparing with 4,000 vacant positions in the Fire Department” and that “the debate must take place here and now” on Civil Protection, after the relevant request filed by the official opposition.
“We are a patriotic force”
Insisting on foreign policy issues, the President of the SYRIZA PS Committee insisted that the government must inform all parties about the progress and development of national issues, because “developments have occurred”, as he said. From the point of view of SYRIZA PS, “the Left will not give a blank check to anyone. We are a patriotic force. We are the government that, under Kotzias’ ministry, had managed to maintain calm without spending large sums of money on armament programs,” recalled Nikos Pappas, adding that “we are the government that had managed to protect the country’s interests. We are the government that achieved the diplomatic lead for Greece”.
In the wake of the recent meeting between the Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis and the Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, “we are in favor of continuous dialogue with Turkey. Timelessly. With clear red lines, however, against the Turkish strategic escalation and aggressive violation of international and European law” noted the President of the SYRIZA Committee PS. Especially for the Cyprus issue, “it is necessary to restart the talks” from where they stopped, i.e. in Crans Montana, added Nikos Pappas.
In the field of the economy, “the downward revision of the growth of the economy for the current year from 2.5% to 2.2% is a mirror of the wrong recipes. It’s an increase in the GDP that concerns a few” remarked Mr. Pappas, adding that “the Government comes and goes below the threshold for the investments that it had set. It sets the bar for investment in the 2024 budget (December 2023) at 15.1%. It then comes and resets the bar to a much lower level of 6.7% for 2024 in the draft medium-term program 2023-2028, verifying its growth deficit in terms of investment.” I learned today from Commission sources unofficially, that the Commission does not prevent any country that wants to impose a ceiling, said Mr. Pappas, to add that “the anemic increase in employment (forecast for 1.2% in 2024 and 0.8% in 2025) is not an answer to unemployment and the needs of society”.
“Brake” on social media
In addition, Mr. Pappas made a special mention of the frequent incidents of violence against minors, but also the incident at A.T. Agios Panteleimon, criticizing the government, announcing a series of initiatives to be precise, with an eye on the rest of the progressive forces.
“We do not claim monoculture and the enshrinement of the one and only truth. We listen to them carefully,” he said, asking them to prove together that there is a common ground of progressive solutions. Looking to the interior of SYRIZA PS, at the same time, the President of the party’s KO requested “our presence on social media should assist our parliamentary work. Neither replace it, nor even more so overshadow it”, saying that “our activity within the parliament can be unifying and multiplying for our space”.
On an ideological level, Nikos Pappas called out Kyriakos Mitsotakis for “historical revisionism”, defending the governing past of SYRIZA PS. “It is clear that Mr. Mitsotakis has deployed and is implementing a strategy of historical revisionism on two levels. With a supposedly progressive-centrist envelope and while it has incorporated figures and strategies of the extreme right of the 2000s, it instrumentalizes and rationalizes the arguments and narratives of the extreme right in Greece. He is trying to erase from the collective memory the period of the post-conflict state and the junta, the political anomaly that many fighters but especially our Republic paid for. The goal, obviously, is to wash away the extreme right and its historical responsibilities”, Nikos Pappas explained on his part.
“The same strategic choice is applied by Mr. Mitsotakis for the period of the SYRIZA government. He wants to erase from the collective memory the central, leading, historical responsibilities of the ND. from recent history. He does not want us to remember that in 2010 we had a formal bankruptcy and that by 2015 we had lost 25% of GDP. He wants us to remember a semester, he says, of 2015. And he makes a systematic attempt to reverse the reality where the people responsible for the bankruptcy abandon the faction that managed to get the country out of the memorandums and get it out with society on its feet. And while he did not have the financial tools and public spending that Mr. Mitsotakis has,” he added, referring to the Tsipras administration.
According to Mr. Pappas, “defending the actions of the SYRIZA government is a historic debt for us. And it’s not about people. It’s about defending history and our own faction but also the people’s struggles to bring about a change.” “SYRIZA-Progressive Alliance must be – and will be – at the cutting edge and vanguard of the progressive counterattack,” he concluded.
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