Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras speaks to the media in Athens, Greece, on June 6, 2019. Greece is at risk of returning to the days of austerity depending on the result of the forthcoming national elections on July 7, Alexis Tsipras warned voters on Thursday. (Xinhua/Marios Lolos)
ATHENS, June 6 (Xinhua) -- Greece is at risk of returning to the days of austerity depending on the result of the forthcoming national elections on July 7, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras warned voters on Thursday.
"The result of the European parliament elections opened the appetite of Greece's old political establishment and of extremely conservative circles in Brussels to question our program and raise obstacles," he said in a statement to media outside his office.
"(They raise obstacles" to our plan to give the opportunity to all those who carried the burden and made sacrifices in order to exit the bailouts, to seize the fruits of their sacrifices today," he said, pointing to a series of relief measures his government announced lately.
The cost of the planned policies on economy which is on the mend after a decade of acute debt crisis, has been met with skepticism by opposition parties in Greece, international lenders and analysts.
Tsipras' remarks came following the release of the creditors' third post-bailout report on Greece on Wednesday in the context of the enhanced surveillance program which noted that the country has made a good start in the new post-bailout period, but that the reform effort "has slowed down in recent months and the consistency of some measures with commitments given to European partners is not assured."
Responding to criticism over a new wave of thousands of hirings in the public sector lately, for example, the Greek leader said that such an issue had not been raised since 2014 and the hiring-layoff/retirement ratio in the public sector had been set to 1:1.
Voters must compare programs between the Ruling Radical SYRIZA party and main opposition conservative New Democracy (ND) and make a choice, bearing in mind that Greece may roll back to the hard times, Tsipras said on Thursday.
In the elections for the European parliament on May 26 and the local elections on June 2, Greek voters handed victories by a large margin to the conservatives, although the Prime Minister had also turned those electoral battles into a vote of confidence in his government.
Following the outcome, Tsipras said that he will visit the Greek President Prokopis Pavlopoulos next week to initiate the procedures for the snap polls which will be held on July 7.
His government's term in office would end in October this year.
"The country managed to exit the bailouts thanks to the sacrifices and efforts of Greek people, but this does not mean that there is no risk of returning to the gloomy days of 2012, 2013 and 2014 and to the harsh policies of bailouts and austerity", he warned on Thursday. "The only way to prevent this return to the past permanently is the choice Greeks will make in the crucial general elections on July 7," he stressed.
