With just three days remaining before Sunday’s election, all political parties focus on persuading the undecided voters while polls show conflicting results and suggest a close race.
Former Prime Minister and head of SYRIZA Alexis Tsipras, in a pre-election rally in Patras town on Wednesday evening, said that the election battle “is the second referendum for the future of Greece” and urged voters to reject new Democracy that represents the “old establishment” of ” servitude, dependency, corruption and vested interests”.
On the other hand, Vangelis Meimarakis, New Democracy's chief, said that if his party wins on Sunday, he will invite all parties to form a government of “cooperation, understanding and national responsibility”
He also referred to what he called “leftist myths” and noted that the poorer social groups were those worst hit under leftist regimes, using free university education as an example.
Meimarakis made it clear that he intends to abolish the newly-introduced 23 per cent VAT for private education and stressed that he would not make empty promises.
Discussing the economy, he attacked the previous SYRIZA-ANEL coalition government for imposing capital controls that had added additional liquidity problems to those already existed.
Stavros Theodorakis, leader of the small centrist party To Potami gave a press conference on Wednesday presenting in detail the economic program of the party. He urged party leaders to reach a political agreement based on three fundamental points: that elections will not be held for the next three years, that the country will meet its bailout program commitments and that the parties will break free of their “partisan armies.”
Communist Party (KKE) Secretary General Dimitris Koutsoumbas, gave a pre-election speech at Syntagma Square on Wednesday evening saying that SYRIZA and New Democracy are the opposite poles of the bourgeois political system.
“The solution, the prospect for the people’s benefit, is the rift, the direct collision, so that people come to power and all means of production are socialised,” Koutsoumbas said.
The latest opinion polls put undecided voters at between 6 to 15 per cent.