(Newswire.net — August 21, 2015) — Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras stepped down leading Greece into another unresting moment with new elections.
“The political mandate of the January 25 elections has exhausted its limits and now the Greek people have to have their say,” Tsipras said in a televised address Thursday night.
Immediately after he addressed the public, Tsipras handed his resignation.
“I think that the main reason Alexis Tsipras declared a snap election is to reduce the negative side effects for the people that voted for him and Syriza – the unemployed, the working classes, the poor, the pensioners,” Syriza party campaigner Anastasia Giamali told RT.
Giving a comment on the bailout Greece signed with ECB, Giamali agreed that isn’t the best agreement for the unemployed, the working classes, the poor and the pensioners. However it is “a far better agreement that any previous government has brought up,” she stressed.
On Friday, Eurozone finance ministers agreed to a €86 billion bailout over three years, however, members of Tsipras’s Syriza party, including former Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis who stepped down as the Minister of Finance, voted against the agreement.
According to The Guardian, Tsipras decided to step down to maintain the stability of his party, knowing that Greece is on the right course, however, “he suffered a major rebellion among members of his ruling Syriza party, nearly one-third of whose 149 MPs either voted against the deal or abstained.”
Although the opinion polls suggest Mr. Tsipras is well placed to return as prime minister, the move may have come too late because Syriza is now likely to split, according to experts.
“These elections … will provide a stable governing solution. My feeling is that Syriza will have an absolute majority,” Dimitris Papadimoulis, a Syriza MEP, told Mega TV. The statement is quite optimistic, but in reality, it is more likely that Syriza would have to enter a coalition in the next election.
Even with financial aid, the political uncertainty is another problem that negatively affects Greece economy, and could result in a bailout failure, experts say.