PM says his gov’t has kept promises
The conservative government has delivered on its promises during its three years in office, Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis said yesterday in a speech likely to add further fuel to speculation about early elections. Speaking in Thessaloniki, Karamanlis highlighted infrastructure projects completed recently in northern Greece and invited PASOK leader George Papandreou to see the projects for himself. «Mr Papandreou has the opportunity see the projects that we started and completed in just three years,» added Karamanlis. The government’s four-year term runs out in March next year but talk of early elections has failed to go away despite Karamanlis repeatedly saying that he will exhaust the full term. Talk of early polls has also put the brakes on a number of government policies, with some ministry officials expecting elections in autumn. On the fight against corruption, a ticket that helped the conservative party get elected in 2004, Karamanlis acknowledged that mistakes had been made but stressed that there had been no cover-up attempts. »We monitor, reveal and refer to the justice system,» he said. The government has seen its popularity drop recently in the wake of a bond scandal involving the purchase of overpriced notes by pension funds.
