'OUR RAGE WILL BE RELENTLESS': SYRIZA FACES MASS STRIKE IN GREECE

Alexis Tsipras

'Our rage will be relentless': Syriza faces mass strike in Greece

Prime minister Alexis Tsipras under pressure as services including schools, hospitals, and banks are hit by 24-hour walkout

Greece is expected to be brought to a halt when employees in both the public and private sector down tools.

Helena Smith in Athens

Thursday 12 November 2015 00.31 EST

Greece’s leftist-led government will get a taste of people power on Thursday when workers participate in a general strike that will be the first display of mass resistance to the neoliberal policies it has elected to pursue.

The country is expected to be brought to a halt when employees in both the public and private sector down tools to protest against yet more spending cuts and tax rises. “The winter is going to be explosive and this will mark the beginning,” said Grigoris Kalomoiris, a leading member of the civil servants’ union Adedy.

“When the average wage has already been cut by 30%, when salaries are already unacceptably low, when the social security system is at risk of collapse, we cannot sit still,” he said.
Alexis Tsipras
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The strike will will increase pressure on Alexis Tsipras, the firebrand who first navigated his Syriza party into power vowing to eradicate austerity. Photograph: Louisa Gouliamaki/AFP/Getty Images

Schools, hospitals, banks, museums, archaeological sites, pharmacies and public services will all be hit by the 24-hour walkout. Flights will also be disrupted, ferries stuck in ports and news broadcasts stopped as staff walk off the job.
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“We are expecting a huge turnout,” Petros Constantinou, a prominent member of the anti-capitalist left group Antarsya told the Guardian. “This is a government under dual pressure from creditors above and the people below and our rage will be relentless. It will know no bounds.”

The general strike – the 41st claim unionists since the debt-stricken nation was plunged into crisis and near economic collapse in 2010 – will increase pressure on prime minister Alexis Tsipras, the firebrand who first navigated his Syriza party into power vowing to eradicate austerity.

On Monday eurozone creditors propping up Greece’s moribund economy refused to dispense a €2bn rescue loan citing failure to enforce reforms.
Banks will be among the public services closed as the 24-hour strike disrupts life across Greece.
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Banks will be among the public services closed as the 24-hour strike disrupts life across Greece. Photograph: Yannis Kolesidis/EPA

Snap elections in September saw Tsipras win a second term, this time pledging to implement policies he had once so fiercely opposed in return for a three-year, €86bn bailout clinched after months of acrimony between Athens and its partners. But Tsipras himself said he did not believe in many of the conditions attached to the lifeline, the third to be thrown to Greece in recent history.

In a first for any sitting government, Syriza also threw its weight behind the strike exhorting Greeks to take part in the protest. The appeal – issued by the party’s labour policy division and urging mass participation “against the neoliberal policies and the blackmail from financial and political centres within and outside Greece” – provoked derision and howls of protest before the walkout had even begun.
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But leading Syriza figures insisted that the party continued to see itself as being true to its leftist ideology. “We agreed to take these measures under pressure,” the Syriza MP Christos Simorelis told local TV. “In Syriza we continue to see the party as one thing, the government another.”

Tsipras, who has repeated his earlier coalition joining forces with the populist, right-wing Independent Greeks party, has already pushed one multi-bill of reforms through parliament. A second, viewed as key to unlocking €10bn for the recapitalisation of banks – which will further slash pensions and freeze wages – is due to be passed in the coming weeks.

Seated in Adedy’s headquarters, his office walls covered with posters denouncing the inequities of austerity, Kalomoiris accuses the government of hypocrisy. Greece may not face default or eurozone exit as it did this summer but the crisis, he says, is far from over.

The prospect of home repossessions for Greeks who fall foul of mortgage repayments will add an incendiary element to a climate already at boiling point.
Two nuns walk past a poster calling for a nationwide 24-hour strike, outside the Bank of Greece, in central Athens.
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Two nuns walk past a poster calling for a nationwide 24-hour strike, outside the Bank of Greece, in central Athens. Photograph: Yannis Kolesidis/EPA

“Syriza may now be trying to save its soul but it has gone back on all its promises,” said Kalomoiris, a life-long leftist who joined a rebel group, Popular Unity, formed by Syriza dissidents when Tsipras signed up to the bailout in July.

“In this country a graduate starts off in the public sector with a salary of €775 a month, or €9,300 a year, and we are being told that wages will be frozen for the next decade and that every tax imaginable will be increased. How will people make ends meet? It has got to the point where a social explosion is inevitable and it will come sooner rather than later.”