NEWS

‘We have a daring, feasible, reform platform’

A complaint often heard is that you still haven’t presented crucial parts of your platform. It is very difficult for them to admit that the platform we have presented on rural development, education, public administration and local government is a new, coherent policy which responds to the aspirations of the public and the demands of the new era. It should suffice to say that the government copied specific measures from our programs. For example, the reduction in fuel prices for farmers, the reduction of VAT from 18 to 8 percent for the purchase of agricultural machinery; in education, the subsidy for student housing, the increase in state expenditure to 5 percent of GDP, and other measures. May I remind you of Education Minister Petros Efthymiou’s insults. We have two more major programs: health, which I shall present on January 14, and the economy, which will be presented at the end of the month. Both are ready; the former was to have been presented on December 1 and the latter in mid-January, but were postponed because I was involved in an accident. We are going to the polls with a complete, daring, feasible reform platform for all sectors. They prefer to go to the polls without knowing what their own platform is. And they can’t use the Convergence Charter that was presented in early September with only arithmetic goals as a platform. Nor can they define whatever they try to present in a short time as a program. That will be as lacking in definition and full of generalizations as are all the programs PASOK has produced so far. We make a commitment to the public today that we will implement our program and will build a strong, just civil society; a Greece whose citizens can advance and where wealth will be produced and distributed fairly among all citizens.

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