Greece enters the
final week of campaigning for national elections with time running out for
Prime Minister Antonis Samaras’s New Democracy to overtake Alexis Tsipras’s
opposition Syriza party and hold to the path of economic reform.
“We will see a clear
Syriza victory,” Aristides Hatzis, an associate professor of law and economics
at the University of Athens, said in a telephone interview. Yet at those levels
of support, it will prove hard for Syriza to secure a majority in the 300-seat
parliament, and “even if they do, it will still be a fragile, slim majority,” Hatzis
said.
Greece’s Jan. 25
election is about more than politics, with each side offering competing
economic models to shape the country’s financial future after more than four
years of existing on international loans. With an extension of Greece’s aid
program due to expire at the end of February, the country will run out of cash
by the end of June if it can’t reach an agreement with its creditors, two
officials said last week.
While Samaras says
that he can seal the deal by the end of next month, his main opponent Tsipras
said in an interview with Ethnos newspaper over the weekend that he can
complete negotiations with the country’s creditors by this summer.
Syriza has only
brought confrontation with European partners, Samaras said in a speech Sunday
evening in his home city of Kalamata. Victory for New Democracy “will keep
Greece within the euro area,” he said.
(Πηγή: bloomberg.com)
