The Greek Parliament had to decide Sunday evening on a controversial pension reform demanded by the EU and IMF creditors, amid protests and on the eve of a meeting of the Eurogroup on Greece.
a total of 26,000 people according to police demonstrated in throughout the day Sunday in Athens and Thessaloniki (north).
on Sunday night, the Parliament around Syntagma square in Athens brief incidents pitted a group of youths and police who fired tear gas, according to AFP photographers.
These last three days, the protests have multiplied in the capital and in Thessaloniki against this reform which provides for increased pension contributions and taxes.
In the late morning, already nearly 15,000 people demonstrated in these two cities, mostly supporters of the workers struggle Front (Pame), close to the KKE communist party. A banner demanded: “Social Security, public and compulsory for all. The plutocracy must pay. ”
Sunday evening 10,000 people demonstrated in Athens and nearly a thousand in Thessaloniki.
However, the mobilization was less than in the last big demonstration against this reform, the 4 February when 50,000 people demonstrated in Athens which 40,000.
the bill recasting the pension system, which was demanded by the country’s creditors in return for new aid plan signed in July, debated in Parliament since Saturday morning and had to be put to the vote in the night from Sunday to Monday.
the leftist government of Alexis Tsipras, who has only a small parliamentary majority with 153 deputies out 300, hopes that the adoption of this reform before the Eurogroup meeting will help to finally open the debate on the thorny issue of debt settlement
-. ‘tomorrow, an important day’ –
Only members of the government coalition – the Syriza left and Anel– sovereignist party should vote for reform. The opposition parties, including that of the right of New Democracy (ND) announced that they would vote against them.
“The steps you vote today are the result of your inability, of the delay (in negotiations with creditors) and your fixed ideas,” commented Kyriakos Mitsotakis, leader of the right new Democracy, in Parliament.
He asked “the departure of the government left power and early elections for Greece avoids applying new measures” rigorously.
Mr. Tsipras responded that “the system required a radical reform than the previous government had dared to do.” He said the bill did not affect low income, which is “the result of long and hard negotiations with the creditors’.
From the late Easter holiday and” despair of people “who are” tired and disappointed by the government of the left “, the mobilization was lower than expected, lamented to AFP Maria, a fifties who showed Sunday.
The government argues that this reform is part of the agreement between Athens and its creditors last summer for the loan granted to the country. At the time, the ND had also voted in favor of this agreement.
But unions denounce a text that provides for the reduction of the highest pensions, merge multiple insurance funds, the increase in contributions, taxes, and taxation for middle and high incomes, and had observed a strike on Friday and Saturday.
The pension reform is part of the logic of the government’s efforts to align with the requirements of the creditors who demand savings of 5.4 billion euros by 2018.
Greece is “almost reached” its objectives of the reforms desired by its creditors and the Eurogroup will conduct “preliminary discussions” about a possible development of the country’s debt, said the president of the European Commission Jean- Claude Juncker in an interview published Sunday in Germany.
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