Delay game on SYRIZA ballots

By Niki Zorba

The end of July was the milestone for SYRIZA, based on the party’s programming, when it was still on “red alert” for elections in the fall.

Delays

As long as even the most suspicious of Koumundourou are now convinced, however, that the “handbrake” in early elections in the fall that the prime minister pulled is not a pretense or a dangerous “dribble” in order to surprise his political opponents, the strategic planning of SYRIZA is readjusted to in relation to party ballot announcements.

It is known, moreover, that Alexis Tsipras is, among other things, in favor of “agrarian” candidates with a technocratic profile in order to “impress”, at the level of impressions, the N.D. of Kyriakos Mitsotakis, which maintains – despite SYRIZA’s constant hammering about “allegedly excellent” – a clear superiority in terms of the competence (and technocracy) of its executives.

Therefore, the timetable has been tacitly extended, with a senior member of Koumoundourou clarifying to “K” that there will indeed be no official announcements about the SYRIZA list in the immediate future, but: “We should not delay too much, in September this backlog must be completed”.

The above delays, however, are among those that are the choice of the party and are part of classic political planning “why should a leader open his papers prematurely?”. Because there are also upheavals that SYRIZA is experiencing at the mercy of “force majeure”, such as the fire in Penteli, which canceled the event for Democracy and Institutions organized largely by the think tank of Alexis Tsipras, and the re-infection of the president of SYRIZA with coronavirus , who tested positive for the second time, in the middle of last week.

This development also “burned” initiatives that he was expected to take regarding Justice and the Lignadis case.

One-sided

The pre-election frenzy in SYRIZA has died down, but the opposite applies to the strategy that the party has drawn up to the TIF, from where the president of SYRIZA will present the party’s government program.

Until then, the SYRIZA cadre will be – almost exclusively – the prime minister and secondarily his government. It is a given that Koumoundourou, by deconstructing Kyriakos Mitsotakis himself, is on the one hand betting on the “scratching” of his image, so that the prime minister can be “caught” and on the qualitative findings of the opinion polls that lead him to personally excel in all critical questions , and on the other hand he wants to expose him to the middle ground and the self-identified “progressives” of the notorious “middle class”.

It is acute, in this context, the criticism leveled at him by Koumoundourou, with associates of Al. Tsipras to aggressively report that “Mr. Mitsotakis appears out of place and time, at a chaotic distance from the reality that citizens experience and constantly invests in a virtual reality that he and his propaganda apparatus create. As long as, however, Mr. Mitsotakis appears as the prime minister of another country, he is distant and unable to perceive the problems of society”.

Accuracy

Accuracy will remain on the front page of SYRIZA, with its “arrows” once again directed personally at Mr. Mitsotakis. From Koumoundourou, in fact, they insist:

“Mr. Mitsotakis appears not to feel the problems of the citizens, he lives in his own world, indifferent to their lifeless everyday life and dependent on big business interests”, citing as examples:

– One in two households cuts basic food items to be able to cope with the bills, according to the SELPE survey.

– Employees’ income ends at best on the 19th day, according to the INE GSEE.

– His refusal to reduce the EFF on fuel has led to an explosion of revenue in the State (3.6 billion in the first half of 2022), essentially adding another type of profiteering, this time from the state.

– According to the Commission, our country has the largest increases in electricity for businesses, the third most expensive for households and the most expensive gasoline in Europe.