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Tsipras sees SYRIZA in government next year

SYRIZA leader Alexis Tsipras is convinced that his party will come to power next year and says that his government would prioritize three key reforms.

In a speech at an American-Hellenic Chamber of Commerce conference in Athens on Tuesday, Tsipras tried to provide more details about how his party would govern if it came to power. He said he was confident this would happen next year as the coalition parties would suffer a heavy defeat in May’s European Parliament elections, precipitating national polls.

Tsipras said that the three reforms a leftist administration would focus on would be: creating a “simple, transparent, stable and effective” tax system; building an “anti-bureaucratic and effective” public administration that would be “weaned off party dependency, exchanges of favors and lack of meritocracy;” and fighting cartels “with anti-oligopolistic legislation and a truly independent… Competition Commission.”

Tsipras also appealed to the business community to help “rebuild the country.” He said that SYRIZA would be open to working with foreign “investors and agencies” on “cooperative forms of economy and growth-inducing projects” but ruled out privatizations.

Speaking later to the Financial Times, Tsipras insisted that a SYRIZA government would seek to replace the terms of Greece’s bailout and would ask for debt relief by convincing skeptics in the eurozone that this would be in their own interests.

“We say to the taxpayers of Germany: For a long time you paid money for Greek banks, not Greek people, and you pay money in programs that are programmed to fail,” he told the newspaper. “You have to stop this procedure. If you continue this procedure, you will never stop paying.”

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