"If we are a popular party, it is because we look out for the poor classes," Samaras said, opening a meeting of the central committee of the ND-affiliated Dake labour organisation in the private sector, and underscored the "triptych of Growth, Competitiveness and Social Cohesion" as "the only road for the country to exit the crisis".
He said ND was showing its "new face", which was being well received by the Greek people, as indicated by the fact that in just one year -- and coming from a heavy defeat (in national elections) -- it has managed to eliminate the difference from its opponent (ruling Pasok).
Greece can exit the crisis only with development, Samaras reiterated, and strongly opposed the government's across-the-board cutbacks in the public sector and reduction of the low incomes.
"Most everyone inside and outside Greece believes that this 'policy of the Memorandum' cannot bring us out of the current situation, and that it has indeed led Greece to an impasse," Samaras said, adding that ND has been vindicated for the determination it manifested with its 'no to the Memorandum'.
Samaras further maintained that the "alternative proposal for exiting the crisis with growth and recovery, rather than recession" that he has proposed "will take us out of the present impasse", adding that an ever increasing number of people agree with it.
Quite the opposite, he continued, "the government is killing growth with the asphyxiation it is imposing, torpedoing competitiveness with a vertical increase in taxes, and destroying the social cohesion through the downgrading of the incomes, and chiefly of those who are not to blame for the present crisis", while the climbing unemployment "has now affected each and every family in Greece".
Samaras also outlined the negative prospects for 2011, saying that unemployment was already running at 13.5 percent and would overshoot the Memorandum's prediction of 14 percent at the end of the year.
In addition, the government has cut back the Public Investments Program to a "desperate degree and consequently there is no private demand, there is no public demand, there are no new investments, and this has dried up, stifled, the market", while the cuts in the low incomes have aggravated the vicious cycle of recession, Samaras said, charging that the Pasok government "cannot understand that, apart from the fact that this money does not go into the market, this money is not spent, and creates the biggest injustice, because it has been taken away from the poorer classes".
ANA
