Electoral Pledges

Mr. Tsipras declared that, “We are the par excellence party of self-criticism.” Yet, he acknowledged no errors and offered no indication that he has abandoned his populist past.

No other government promised so much only to break one after another of the pledges that it handed out right and left.

The electoral horizon can be measured by opinion polls but also by the results of the European Parliament election in May.

The SYRIZA-Independent Greeks coalition is rushing to make citizens believe that the country is returning to normalcy and that due to its goodness it is handing out money and hiring pledges right and left.

Greece will stay at the tail end of eurozone states, and Greeks who are in the lower economic brackets of salaried employees will remain the poor relatives in the family.

Those parties which were condemned by the government as constituting the “old” political system left their old bad habits behind, and the “new regime” copied all those habits in a bid to ensure its political survival.

It would be disastrous for the government to create yet another crisis within a crisis through a new round of imprudent policies.

It would be a potentially fatal error for society to believe that the economy is back on track. In fact, there is a long road ahead.

The problem is the PM's untrammeled pledges of handouts, the en masse civil service hiring, and the salary hikes for those affiliated with the ruling party.

Theodoros Fessas, the head of the Hellenic Federation of Enterprises, underlined that “All politicians, on both sides [the two largest political parties] are distributing money which does not exist,” he said.

The government is returning to the policies of civil service hiring and welfare benefits, implemented between 2004 and 2009, with disastrous results.

Greek citizens know what the post-bailout reality is. They are absolutely cognizant of the fact that that there will be a long, uphill road.