SYRIZA leader and former prime minister Alexis Tsipras on Tuesday evening said he initially considered resigning from the party’s helm in the wake of a catastrophic showing by the leftist party (20.1 percent) in the May 21 election, while adding “I didn’t have the right to desert”.
Speaking during his first interview on a prime-time newscast since SYRIZA’s poor electoral showing, Tsipras said the goal for a second election on June 25 is to “prevent the dominance of Kyriakos Mitsotakis”, a reference to the incumbent prime minster, whose center-right New Democracy (ND) came in first with 40.8 percent of the vote. The latter figure, however, wasn’t enough to form a majority government, as the electoral law, as voted by a previous SYRIZA government, was simple proportional.
“I won’t hide; I thought about resigning, and this tormented me not only for hours, but for the first few days. However, after the shock I realized that the only thing I don’t have the right to do right is desert. I didn’t have the right to abandon 1.2 million voters who trusted us, and SYRIZA supporters, in a difficult moment,” he said, in fielding questions on the Athens-based Star Channel’s newscast.
“If these (election) results are repeated, we’ll have a mismatch and an unbridled government. It will be painful for democracy to deal with an all-powerful government; imagine an unrestrained Mitsotakis, what else will he do in terms of wiretapping or constitutional revision?” he asked, rhetorically.
