At 4 pm, Stefanos Kasselakis is expected to pass the door of the office of Nikos Androulakis in Parliament, for the first formal meeting of the new president of SYRIZA with the president of PASOK.
The semantics are clear, at least from PASOKs point of view: the part of the meeting is institutional, to reflect the style of the conversation, while at the same time Kasselakis is the guest and not the host.
Where is SYRIZA aiming?
Each side has a different objective from this meeting. In SYRIZA, they certainly have bigger problems at the moment, but they have not stopped “playing” through the statements of officials with the idea of a progressive front, as they believe was formed in the second round of the local government elections.
And at the same time, they do not stop the spikes towards PASOK, recently even for the party’s loans – they know that, if something does not happen that will completely change the situation that is forming for the next months, the biggest battle they will fight in the European elections will be the one with the party of Nikos Androulakis for second place.
Androulakis goes to the meeting with ease
At the same time, in PASOK they go to this meeting with the comfort of one whose hands are not tied for the first time in ten years: the latest opinion polls of voting intentions show that PASOK is on a steady (albeit small) rise each time, while SYRIZA is losing more and more power. That is why, for Androulakis, the meeting has a completely ceremonial character.
He has already separated his position from persons within SYRIZA who symbolize everything that separates the two parties, he has criticized the new leadership of the main opposition party for the back-and-forth in terms of progressive alliances but also for its positions – a phrase for his Tempis Kasselakis who spoke of a conflict caused by a “human factor”, but also the discussion about trolls, caused comments from the center-left executives.
At the same time, Harilaou Trikoupi has laid the foundations for the possible partnerships to which PASOK is open – it is considered that the intentions of SYRIZA will be seen in practice, in parliament, with whether or not it will support PASOK’s initiatives such as the establishment of a preliminary committee on Tempe.
Do wiretaps bring them together?
Could the wiretapping agenda bring them closer together? The two leaders were at the same conference on Independent Authorities last Thursday to hear Christos Rammos (again the arrangement had its semantics, as “institutional” distances were maintained), and both are throwing their weight in the direction of the investigation for the monitoring, while Kasselakis is visiting today the president of Authority for Independent Communications -ADAE (a move that Androulakis also made last week), but also Konstantinos Menoudakos of the Personal Data Protection Authority.
And at this point, however, any consensus that could possibly exist, at an institutional level, also goes through the admission that the story about the “blackmailed” president of PASOK, which was adopted very recently by the media, was close to SYRIZA, is clearly rejected by the party.
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