The budget tabled by the government expresses the interests of big capital at the expense of the modern needs of our people. He is unfair, classist, anti-popular and that’s why we are voting against him”, stressed the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the KKE, Dimitris Koutsoubas, in his today’s, Sunday, December 17, speech to the Parliament on the State Budget 2024.

As he noted “from all the positions these days of the state budget discussion, the two political lines that exist and collide on all major issues are very clearly highlighted” and the same is the case with the biggest problem that concerns workers and the people, which is that of accuracy.

He said that “the first line, all of you, is disconnecting the problem from its causes and attributing it to a deviation from capitalist normality” adding that “it’s just that you have some variation among you as to exactly what that deviation is. Here you appear to disagree, because in normality you are in complete agreement.”

He emphasized and explained in detail that everything that the ND government cites as the causes of accuracy “is in the DNA of the capitalist system”, while at another point in his speech he pointed out that the ND government co-shapes and participates with its policy, in all fields , the causes of precision which he “presents as ‘imported'”.

Citing electricity accuracy as an example, he said that “as long as the real causes that create electricity accuracy remain intact, i.e. the ‘liberation’ of the energy market, commoditization and the so-called ‘green transition’, the problem is not going to be dealt with”.

He said, among other things, that “the cosmogony of expansionary fiscal policy and the Recovery Fund leads with mathematical precision to a rise in inflation, since it increases the mass of money in circulation, faster than the mass of goods increases.”

“So, enough of this import banter! The time has come for you to take responsibility for the policy you embrace and implement,” he said addressing the government.

Referring to the “suitors of the sinful social democracy, SYRIZA, PASOK, “New Left” he said that for everything they are fighting a real battle to convince, that supposedly in other EU countries everything is idyllic, and that everything here is a Greek peculiarity and deviation . Not only is the EU policy implemented by the ND government not responsible for them, but, on the contrary, the EU is the one that is trying to put the country on the right track, but the government does not listen to it”.

“You, the sinful social democracy, only show us the indicators in which Greece is low or at the bottom of the EU, and on the other hand, the ND government only shows us the indicators that are above average. In the meantime, whatever the indicators say, workers are being tortured in Greece and in the rest of Europe,” he added.

“The millions of workers who have taken part in recent years in the largest strike gatherings of the last decades will know more than you, gentlemen of PASOK and SYRIZA,” he said, stressing that “the point is that the struggles continue, not stop but to escalate, to deepen their content and not to become a vehicle for government changes of roughly the same cut”.

Pointing out that it is a law of capitalism that countries do not have the same level of development and productivity, nor the same sizes in their markets” he noted that “in many of the Greek indicators in relation to those of other countries, the heavy consequences of the ten years of barbaric memo policy that you alternately served ND, PASOK and SYRIZA”.

He referred to the consistency of indicators that show the heavy consequences for the people, such as the inability to carry out necessary medical examinations, the state of public hospitals and Education.

D. Koutsoubas said that PASOK and SYRIZA as governments “implemented as a direction what the ND is implementing today, while as an opposition they supported it”.

Always speaking to the point, he referred to the low wages set by all governments, the taxes – which he referred to with figures – which “gnaw away at the disposable income of the people, while many of them are also incorporated into prices.

He added that with the “extremism” voted by the ND government ten days ago, “the aim is not tax evasion, but the closure of small independent professionals and scientists”.

He said, characteristically, that “money trees exist” for “big investors-sharks, shipowners, banks, companies listed on the Stock Exchange”.

Speaking about product prices, he said the government is “doing everything to advance the dominance of monopolies in the market, which raises prices.”

He emphasized that accuracy can be addressed with the proposals of the KKE “to restore the Collective Labor Agreements, for tax-free up to 12,000 euros increased for each child, for the abolition of excise taxes on electricity and fuel, for the abolition of the energy exchange and price ceiling of the current”.

D. Koutsoubas said that the effect of economic developments on the life of the people is not independent of the developments in foreign policy.

He said that the KKE “does not adopt the climate of complacency cultivated by the Greek people” and “insists that the so-called “restart” of Greek-Turkish relations takes place against the very dangerous framework formed by NATO’s plans for painful settlements in the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean Sea which entail serious risks for the sovereignty, for the sovereign rights of the country, in the context of a painful compromise and the “Kazan – Kazan”, the division in two, which the Turkish state is projecting”.

“We say this clearly to the Greek people, they have nothing to do with the interests of the peoples of the two countries, they serve above all the interests of the Greek and Turkish business groups,” he stressed.

He underlined, among other things, that “the KKE opposes any kind of retreat to sovereignty and sovereign rights, to the change of International Treaties that define the borders and works for the development of the common struggle of the peoples of Greece, Turkey, Cyprus and others peoples of the region, for their own interests. From this point of view, no one can be complacent, on the contrary, our people are forced to worry and be vigilant.”

D. Koutsoumbas said that the implementation of the budget “is conditional. Not only because the coming year also brings rapid developments, both in the economy and in international relations. But above all, because the more the problems accumulate, the more anger accumulates, the more emphatic the mismatch of the people’s living conditions with the very possibilities of the time becomes, the more difficult it will be for you to manipulate them, to extract consent of him for long periods of time”.

“And don’t kid yourself that you’re playing without an opponent. After all, there has never been a so-called official opposition, a real, strategic opponent of the governments. Your real adversary is all those workers, life-wrestlers, retirees, young men and women, who already form the streams of resistance, which do not take long to merge and become a raging river, which will sweep away all that holds us back back.

We pledge that we will dedicate all our energies and as much as the Greek people will give us in the next period, in the coming years, to this very purpose” emphasized, concluding his speech, the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the KKE.