Greece’s leftist Syriza party and its main rival, conservative New Democracy, have been running neck-and-neck in polls before Sunday’s election, making an outright victor unlikely.
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Prominent party members who deserted Syriza stood in the same spot Tuesday night, lining up to attack Tsipras and his short-lived government as Greeks head back to the polls Sunday with political parties fractured by the weight of a massive new global bailout that aims to prevent a potentially catastrophic default and Greece being forced out of the eurozone.
Polls suggest neither of the two leading parties will win an absolute majority that would allow them to form a government without allying with a less-popular party.
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“I never want you to be prime minister again”, he told Tsipras during a one-on-one televised debate on Monday.
Syriza has said it would like to ally with its former coalition partner, the Independent Greeks – who have also ruled out an alliance with New Democracy.
In such a scenario, the most likely coalition candidates would be the centrist To Potami, or The River, party, and the once-mighty socialist PASOK party which dominated Greek politics for decades but saw its voter base decimated in the wake of Greece’s first bailout. “But the party must work with Syriza, they must be united”. Alexis Tsipras will do the same in the capital’s Syntagma Square, on Friday.
He has also received support from other leftist parties around Europe.
Asked last week in an interview with Reuters whether he would renegotiate parts of the bailout, Meimarakis said Greece had to make significant progress and meet its fiscal targets to regain its foreign lenders’ trust.
In early July, as Greece was starved of funds and struggling to pay the salaries and pensions of its public servants, Tsipras called a referendum, saying it was for Greeks to decide whether they wanted to shoulder more of the “humiliation and suffering” of another bailout.
Off the record, a Syriza official said the party was banking on a score of 34 percent, down 2.4 points from January, in the September 20 polls. His party has split in two, with a breakaway far-left faction opposed to the new bailout now polling only around 3.5 percent.
Four opinion polls on Thursday underlined the tightness of Greece’s election campaign, offering different outcomes but all pointing to no outright victor when ballots are cast.
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Tsipras said Syriza would implement the agreement “as fast as possible, (but) fighting on the issues that lie ahead”.
