Simitis will be ‘present’ in 2004
Buoyed by the first breakthrough in the war against domestic terrorism, Prime Minister Costas Simitis yesterday told a national conference of his PASOK party that he will lead the party in the 2004 elections. The three-day «organizational conference» that began yesterday was expected to provide a platform for dissenters to criticize party leadership’s course at a time when opinion polls have shown PASOK trailing New Democracy by up to 9.4 percent. But the unprecedented success against the November 17 group suddenly gave Simitis and his reformist camp the upper hand. The prime minister attacked both New Democracy and the leftist parties but also demanded that his party’s notables «show the necessary collective responsibility in shaping and supporting changes.» Simitis said he would not ease his economic policy, stressing that the government aimed to improve living conditions, succeed as president of the EU in the first half of next year, achieve Cyprus’s EU accession, solve the problem of the delineation of the Aegean Sea, and prepare for a successful Olympic Games. «I have tied my political course with these aims and until they are met I will be present with the will and the mandate of the Greek people in 2004,» he said. He charged that PASOK would not allow New Democracy to turn Greece into «a Third World country.» The conservatives’ leader, Costas Karamanlis, retorted last night that it was New Democracy that had led Greece into the EU while PASOK had fought against this.
