SYRIZA campaign pledges fade amid tough negotiation with creditors

The four-month anniversary of radical leftist SYRIZA party’s ascent to power comes as it struggles to clinch a deal to extend bailout financing from international creditors and, more ominously, with several of its main pre-election pledges apparently abandoned in the face of tough negotiations.

The unpopular property tax (Enfia) that sullied the previous conservative-socialist coalition government will remain (for 2015, SYRIZA claims), while other campaign promises of raising the minimum monthly wage level (in the private sector), reinstating a so-called 13th pension (paid between Christmas and New Year’s) and raising the ceiling for non-taxable yearly income to 12,000 euros also appear as mere … mirages at present.

Asked last week over the (now) SYRIZA government’s pre-election pledges, spokesman Gavriil Sakellaridis replied that “… the popular mandate has a four-year span…”

Nevertheless, rewind to before the Jan. 25 election victory by the radical left in Greece and ones finds the so-called “Thessaloniki program”, which was billed as offering “immediate relief” to the portions of society most affected by the recession and austerity measures.

It was in Thessaloniki, in fact, that then main opposition leader and current PM Alexis Tsipras said the property couldn’t be modified, but only eliminated.