Nadia Giannakopoulou in Peristeri: Leading from the Front When Others Stayed Silent

Nadia Giannakopoulou proposes a shift to the center, stressing that PASOK aims to express “the impoverished middle class and the most vulnerable citizens” with clear positions and initiatives.

The PASOK leader candidate, speaking at a gathering of her party friends in Peristeri, developed her plan for the next day of the internal party elections, and again criticized the current leadership, She recalled her disagreement with the party’s ‘line’ – such as on non-state universities and absentee voting – and declared her determination to restore PASOK “as a large movement that can be a convincing government proposal and an alternative to the governance of the South Caucasus”.D”.

“We are convinced that we can be a strong and decisive force for the government and the government of the West.

“You know that I have always been on the front line in difficult times, fighting the battle for PASOK when others were hiding, leaving PASOK, or watching from afar.

And all that my candidacy stands for and I believe that it is what the center-left can recover and defeat New Democracy in the parliamentary elections,” Mrs Giannakopoulou said, addressing the members and friends of the party who attended her central pre-election speech on Monday evening at the Amphitheatre of the City Hall of Peristeri.

The PASOK Presidential candidate began her speech by saying :

“I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your presence here tonight, for your great, moving response to my call just five days before the elections for the new President of PASOK. I am especially happy to be among you, I get tremendous strength every time we meet and you show me your love and support. I look you in the eyes and I say to you.

After all, we have fought so many battles together over the years, from the very difficult ones when some people heralded the end of PASOK when they said that PASOK had come full circle.

We have all fought battles together to stand up, to move forward. Battles that we have fought and fought over the years, during periods when others ran en masse to become SYRIZA officials and co-govern unmolested in the company of the far right and others than to become ministers or elected officials of New Democracy.

But that’s the way it is and battles are won by those who fight the hardest, by those who are present and not those who are absent. And this applies to today as well as to the recent past and the difficult days of our movement. Today we are called upon to win a very crucial battle.

The restoration of PASOK as a protagonist, on which Greeks can rest their dreams. As it was in the past, in the great days of PASOK, when our Movement became a force of social subversion with our founder Andreas Papandreou, with the underprivileged of Greek society coming out of the margins.”

In her speech, she stressed.

“In five days we vote for new leadership. These elections are not ordinary With the new leadership and it is imperative that they do and that we all together have a duty to the country and society :

To respond to the national need for a total reset of PASOK, not as a party of small steps, of compromise with substantial immobility around small percentages, but as a party that will express society and be able to govern the country. The goal is no longer the survival of PASOK, we have achieved that, but how to become a majority party with proposals and actions that will make life better for the citizens. Leaving behind the schemes of the past and any heteronomy.

With a firmly reformist and, anti-climactic character; and modern discourse so that we can reach out to society today and especially to young people. This is exactly why the election for the new President is crucial.

This election is crucial because let’s not hide. We all write history together, but the role of the person or persons leading the effort is particularly decisive for the momentum, the determination, the contact with society, and the political stigma he or she emits.

I don’t believe anyone can object to simple truths.

The person elected will determine whether PASOK will enter a phase of ascension, its transformation into the party of social democracy and the center-left, of great reforms and hope, or whether it will remain a party of blurred positions, heteronomy, unclear orientation, and physiognomy.

The result of the election will determine whether we will remain compromised with stagnation or small steps that lead nowhere or whether we will once again become the party that can clash with K. Mitsotakis and ND

Because the result will determine whether we will again become the great Movement that will march together and for society, that will function as an open party, as a collective political subject, and not as a mechanism that is afraid even of the meeting of its organs.

It is necessary not to forget.

We do not hold elections because suddenly some people have expressed ambitions or some people had personal, while everything was supposedly going so well for us.

But this is what we are being told by some people who until a few days before the election were themselves calling it a political failure if we are not elected second and with seriously boosted percentages. How can we beat Mitsotakis when even Kasselakis passed us and we lost 110,000 votes on top of that?

And then the embellishment, the rounding, the “we didn’t do so badly”

Ms. Giannakopoulou closed her celebratory speech by saying:

“As far as I am concerned, after much deliberation, with a sense of responsibility, I submitted my candidacy. I did not file it to get a percentage. I filed it because I believe I can do it if the people who vote honor me and eventually elect me President. I have filed my candidacy because I have the vision and the drive to put into practice what I have just mentioned, bringing about the necessary changes in its physiognomy, its opposition tactics as a protagonist party that will not be heteronomous, but also in its structure and its necessary democratic functioning. It will once again express society and reconnect with it, transforming it into political action. Which will release the creative forces of society. For, I have given examples of writing by putting forward proposals that were often even in opposition to our official stance, as in the case of absentee voting and non-state non-profit universities. And today we need politicians with opinions, with a point of view, not balancers who after so many years in politics have never made their mark or identified with anything.

You know very well that I am a politician of society, not of mechanisms or systems, and you can see what war is being waged on me by channels and newspapers, and this is my vision for PASOK and the country. I am clear that we need a shift in the centrist, democratic area that will express the impoverished middle class, the most vulnerable, the people who live from their jobs, towards a politics based on logic and social sensitivity.

I have shown that I am unrepentantly against concepts according to which it is not a problem to maintain PASOK in small percentages, but I believe in a large party that will once again be the leading party. You know that I have always been on the front line in difficult times, fighting for PASOK when others were hiding, leaving PASOK, or watching from afar.

And all that my candidacy stands for and I believe that it is what the center-left can recover and defeat New Democracy in the parliamentary elections!”

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