With the pre-election slogan of SYRIZA-PS “today we know and we can”, answered Mr Alexis Tsipras to the question of Stavros Theodorakis – in the context of the show “Protagonists”, on the Alpha television station – if he is “ready for the invasion of Maximos”, a question that, as he recalled, he had asked him again in 2012. “This time it will not be an invasion . I have the experience, and indeed the unpleasant experience, of a very difficult period. In 2012, what prevailed was the optimism of the will, not of knowledge,” he characteristically said.

The president of SYRIZA PS emphasized that “the first and third parties will be able to form a government” in the elections of simple proportionality, the president of SYRIZA PS emphasized. He stated that he neither expects nor envisages that there will be a government that will be based on tolerance “and indeed of a party whose president, Mr. Varoufakis, deliberately brought into the debate this obsession of his that has ended definitively since 2015 and made a very big gift to Mr. Mitsotakis”. “And in any case, with these obsessions there is no chance for me,” he stressed.

He noted that he wants a stable, long-term, 4-year government and that “this can only be done on a programmatic basis.” “With whom will Androulakis form the social democratic government?” Will he do it with ND? Alas,” he commented. He characterized as paradoxical the condition set by the president of PASOK that the president of the first party in a cooperation government should not be prime minister, considering that he will not persist. “After the elections, we will all operate based on the responsibility for the country to have a government” “And the feeling of the survival of each area separately”, he added, commenting that “this will mainly be a problem of the smaller parties”.

“He comes out and says, and reasonably, that those responsible for the wiretapping, of the parastatal, should go to prison. I didn’t say this conversation, Mr. Androulakis said it,” continued Mr. Tsipras, noting that “it is obvious that there will be no accountability for the faults of the parastatal with a ND government. “Well, Mr. Androulakis should, if he believes what he says, start admitting that the only prospect for a social democratic government and for the purification of public life will be with a government of progressive cooperation with SYRIZA and PASOK”.

On the question of whether the prison also concerns political leaders, Mr. Tsipras said that “when this comes to the discussion table it is obvious that our political and legal system has specific procedures for the criminal responsibilities of political figures. And if this investigation is opened in depth, it is obvious where it will end up. It will come down to political figures, is there any doubt? Who did the monitoring and why? So that a third, fourth factor, not Mr. Mitsotakis himself, learns?” He commented that Mr. Mitsotakis said in the teleconference that there was a “scandal” and that there was no “national issue”. “If there was no national reason, how could national secrecy be invoked to cover up the investigation?”, he stressed.

“What are you saying”, replied Mr. Tsipras to the question of whether Mr. Velopoulos could be “the new Kammenos”. “If there is anyone who can work with Velopoulos, it is Mitsotakis,” he noted.

He mentioned about Panos Kammenos and AN.ELL. that ’15 was a “necessary evil”. He added that he has no complaint from Mr. Kammenos in the first phase of government and that the period of rupture with him came “when I had before me the opportunity for the country which was the Prespa Agreement. The easiest thing for me would be to say? Come on, the next one. I didn’t do it knowing that these big opportunities don’t come every three or so times. If it had not been done, we would have a Libya on our northern border that would be beaten by third countries…”.

Regarding the issue of Kasidiaris party, Mr. Tsipras said that the whole story could have ended if the government had accepted to insert the amendment proposed by SYRIZA into the existing law. “It appeared in retrospect that Mr. Mitsotakis had another plan, he was not interested in excluding only Kasidiaris but in dealing the deck in the right apartment building. It was evident from the statements of Mr. Tzanerikos,” he said. “The anxiety was not about Kasidiaris, but about half of the parties in the right-wing apartment building being left out,” he added. “A lot of things we couldn’t think of in this country in these 4 years and a lot of things we ‘eaten unchewed’ precisely because we couldn’t think of them,” he commented, among other things. “Yes, we could not imagine that Mitsotakis is watching his ministers. That he is watching the head of the Armed Forces. That the Prosecutor of the Supreme Court will impose a ‘block’ on Mr. Rammos to prevent him from finding the evidence. That they will invoke National secrecy to cover up the biggest scandal of the Post-colonialism,” he said.

Speaking about the polls, he estimated that the people who will go to vote will not be so influenced by them. He commented that in any job if someone makes a mistake there will be sanctions, but “no matter what the pollsters say, nothing happens the next day, we are friends again”. “If a politician loses by six points, will he be sanctioned?” Mr. Tsipras was asked. “Of course he will have sanctions, obviously he will have sanctions. I lost by 8 points in the European elections and decided to go to elections, my planning was different… My moral understanding of politics and democracy has been proven”, said the president of SYRIZA. He noted that “politicians are judged by the citizens and what will be the difference, who will be second and who will be first, will determine the political developments. The only ones who are not judged are those who create a climate with the measurements and if they fall out they say that the climate has changed in the last week and nothing is going on.” When asked about his intentions for the future, Mr. Tsipras emphasized that “the popular verdict will largely show the course of everything after these elections”, however as he said “if you serve some social needs, you have a reason to stay when you serve no need, life itself rejects you.”

Asked about the responsibility of the SYRIZA government for the tragedy in Tempe, Mr. Tsipras said that “this state” of client relations and “bribes” was not built by his party and emphasized that with this accident the “story” collapsed of the Mitsotakis government on “staff state”. He also added that what must be done in the future is to change “the way the system works”, “to become Europe”.

When asked about the public evaluation, the president of SYRIZA noted that it should exist “in another context” and not be linked to the layoffs, because “social consensus” is necessary for such reforms. He also pointed out that the government “didn’t pay attention” to the accident and “40 days later they appointed the daughter of a DAKE trade union leader to the OSE”. Besides, he said that the general “discrediting of the concept of public space” is also a problem, bringing as an example the privatization of PPC and the issue of water, as he added.

Regarding the responsibility of the SYRIZA government for the privatization of OSE, he underlined that OSE then had to face “huge sanctions” from the European Commission and SYRIZA “paid for the sins” of previous governments by taking the “heavy political cost”. “We didn’t make a mistake. We had no other choice,” he said, while stressing that the causes of the accident had nothing to do with privatization but with the government’s “discrediting” of OSE. In addition, he said that “the great opportunity” to stop the customer relations system from existing, is the cooperation governments because “autonomous governments have led us to bankruptcy and also to mold in the public sector”. Asked to comment on the “unreliability” that the parties have for the citizens, Mr. Tsipras noted, among other things, that “it is not the same” to be governed by progressive forces that serve the “interests of the many” and that the main weakness of this government is “arrogance” and “the feeling that they don’t care about people’s problems.” “What needs to change is accountability, transparency in institutions, meritocracy,” he added. He said that the memoranda had a very wrong fiscal prescription but a part of them were “self-evident reforms” and that unfortunately in the first period the governments left behind the reforms and went to the fiscal ones. He claimed that SYRIZA made “great reforms”.

Asked about SYRIZA’s promise to abolish the minimum entry base and whether this was “old-party”, he said it would be justified if there was “another system, like the national baccalaureate”, but now the government’s only logic was to create an “artificial barrier” to the number of students in order to reduce spending on higher education and to “push a large part into private education”, which he said he considered “immoral”. Regarding the university police, he commented that essentially “nothing has changed” even though the government spent “30 million” and that guarding should also be “the responsibility of the university community and the student movement”. Regarding non-state universities, he commented that if there was the possibility of becoming a Harvard, “let’s talk about it”, however, as he said, the problem is that “there is no trust” and that “in the back of the mind of some extreme neoliberals” is to make the universities a field of “wild speculation”, as a result of which they “degrade even more” the public ones.

Asked if the European elections would be better to be held by a list instead of a cross-party, he said that for him it was also a dilemma in 2019. “I backed out because the criticism I would receive would be that I want the MEPs to be appointed.” He mentioned, among other things, that when the whole country becomes a region, it is unfair for the qualified but not nominated candidates. “If there can be a broad consensus of all parties, that’s something we could discuss,” he added.