Greek PM offers compromise to avert snap presidential polls

PanARMENIAN.Net - Greece’s embattled Prime Minister Antonis Samaras has offered a compromise to ensure presidential elections go smoothly and snap polls are averted in the imminent future, the Guardian reported.

Pleading with MPs to “listen to their conscience,” the leader took the unprecedented step of saying he would be open to early elections in 2015 if the 300-seat parliament could agree to back the government’s candidate, Stavros Dimas, as head of state. The government’s four-year term ends in mid-2016.

“The Greek people do not want early elections,” Samaras said on Sunday, Dec 21, in an unscheduled televised address. “And they are right. The political uncertainty has to end …. we cannot be swamped in an electoral battle right now.”

Greeks deputies, who vote in a second round for the constitutional figurehead on Tuesday, fell far short of amassing the 200 ballots needed last week. A third on Dec 29 requires 180 votes. But if that also fails, snap polls are automatically called, opening up the prospect of prolonged political turmoil in a country only just beginning to emerge from its worst economic and social crisis in modern times.

With a narrow majority of 155, the ruling coalition has found itself fighting for every vote in an atmosphere that has become increasingly toxic politically. On Friday the election descended into accusations of dirty tricks when members of the small populist Independent Greeks party accused the government of trying to bribe MPs to support Dimas, a former European commissioner.

Attempting to take some of the heat out of the poll, a visibly fatigued Samaras offered the olive branch of also enlarging his fragile coalition with cross-party lawmakers who belonged to other pro-European forces.

“After the presidential election, we can expand the government, with the participation of other people who believe in the European perspective of the country so that the next phase will find us more united,” he said, according to the Guardian.

Greece, whose economy has been kept afloat by controversial financial assistance programs since its near brush with bankruptcy four years ago, is in the midst of finalizing negotiations aimed at exiting the bailouts with creditors at the EU, ECB and IMF. The radical left main opposition Syriza party, whose anti-bailout rhetoric has ensured it has a healthy lead in opinion polls, has pledged to annul the accords saying they have plunged Greece into a vicious cycle of austerity-driven recession.

Amid mounting anxiety that the government will not be able to get Dimas elected, the looming stalemate has alarmed international markets, re-igniting memories of the euro crisis and fears that Athens may be forced to exit the euro zone.

Highlighting those concerns, Samaras appealed to MPs’ “commonsense” saying it was vital the negotiations were completed in what he described as conditions of calm and certainty.

“And after that, strengthened economically and politically, we can find the most suitable time-table for national elections even at the end of 2015,” he said.

With the winds of popular support behind it, Syriza reacted to the concessions saying Samaras had only made them because he knew he would not be able to win the presidential election.

“The process of the election will be completed and the people will speak,” it said alluding to the snap polls it sees as imperative to ending austerity measures that have pauperized large swathes of the Greek population.