Former financial minister for SYRIZA Euclid Tsakalotos used an international media outlet to ‘inform’ the Greek people “how he and Alexis Tsipras instrumentalized the referendum and misled the Greek people in order to sign an austerity agreement with lenders that was a far cry from what they had promised,” government spokesperson Pavlos Marinakis said, accusing Tsakalotos of “blatant political cynicism.”
Commenting on
statements to the Financial Times, Marinakis said, Tsakalotos
admitted “it would be very difficult to achieve a compromise
with a good dollop of austerity without a referendum.” The
spokesperson continued, “He practically admitted, with a 10-year
delay, even through the foreign press, the ruthless misleading of
citizens by the SYRIZA-ANEL government with the ‘theatrics’ of the
so-called six-month negotiation that led to the dramatic referendum
of 2015.”
Marinakis added, “Mr
Tsipras misled the Greek people, allowing half his government to plan
for Greece’s exit from the eurozone and the other half to promote a
fake referendum, when workers were losing their jobs and the economy
was collapsing along with the confidence of citizens and investors.”
Their cynicism,
along with their destructive adventurism and unparalleled
demagoguery, will go down in history as a bad example of political
action, the spokesperson noted.
“We call on
both Mr Tsipras and Mr Tsakalotos to take a clear stance in Greek
media as well: Was the referendum a setup to mislead the Greek people
in order to lead them to a predetermined agreement that, in the end,
cost another 100 billion euros to the Greek people?” Marinakis
asked.
