It is well known that the two-party government of ND and PASOK has decided to speed up the process for the election of the President of the Republic that was supposed to begin in February 2015. The candidate supported by ND and PASOK is Stavros Dimas, an official of ND.
The government is trying to convince that the election of the President of the Republic is necessary, so as to continue unimpeded the implementation of the anti-people anti-labour measures which will lead the country to a capitalist development that will allegedly benefit the Greek people as a whole.
The biggest opposition party, the new social democratic party SYRIZA, is in favour of holding early elections. This party claims that a development will be achieved by a “left government” that it intends to form through a different management of economy (always in the framework of the country’s participation to the EU, the Eurozone and of course in NATO), reproducing outdated social democratic Keynesian positions and extolling the economic model of Obama.
The first round of the vote on the presidential election which requires 200 votes out of the 300 MPs of the Greek Parliament will take place in the afternoon of 17th December. A second round which also requires 200 MPs is scheduled for 23nd December and a third vote that requires 180 votes will take place on 29th December.
If the Parliament fails to elect the President of the Republic early elections will take place.
Although the two-party government has currently 155 MPs (127 of the “conservative” ND and 28 of the social democratic PASOK) , it reckons that it may win a significant section of the independent MPs (24 MPs who were elected with the bourgeois parties and withdrew over the past two years) as well as a section of the two smaller parties: the “right-wing” Independent Greeks (12 MPs) and the “left-wing” Democratic Left (10 MPs) that in case of early elections might not exceed the 3% threshold and not elect MPs. Nevertheless, both parties have decided not to support this candidate.
The social democratic party SYRIZA (71 MPs) will vote against the candidate so that early elections take place.
The fascist Golden Dawn (16 MPs) is also against this candidacy.
The KKE (12 MPs) has stated that it will not vote for the President of the Republic, irrespective of the person, because the constitutional role of this institution has to do with the ratification of anti-people laws adopted by the parliaments and the governments.
At the same time, the KKE underlines in its interventions that the election or non election of the President of the Republic will not solve any problem of the people and that the bourgeois governments cannot guarantee the recovery of the enormous losses of the people regardless of whether they call themselves “left” or not. On the contrary, they serve the same path of the capitalist economy, the participation in the imperialist unions EU and NATO that leads to new hazards for the people.
The KKE calls the working class and the other popular strata to fight for the abolition of all the anti-people laws and for the recovery of the losses. The people should not follow passively the developments; they must strengthen the KKE everywhere; they must contribute to effort to regroup the labour and people’s movement so as to pave the way for the only way-out that benefits the people i.e. to get rid of the bonds of the EU, NATO and the monopolies, to change not merely the government but the class in power through the socialization of the means of production, central planning workers’ and people’s control.