Greek leftist vows to scrap bailout

Antonis Samaras (L) and Alexis Tsipras (R)

Greece's radical leftist party Syriza, likely to win crucial June 17 elections, vowed yesterday to scrap an international bailout, freeze loan payments and reverse austerity reforms including privatization amid rising fears.
"The bailout deal is an automatic pilot to utter disaster," Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras told party supporters as he unveiled an election programme that runs contrary to many of Greece's loan obligations.
"We ask for the vote of the Greek people in order to annul it" so that it can be renegotiated, he told a packed auditorium in a run-down Athens neighbourhood.
The vote will determine whether Greece will meet the terms of a deal under which the European Union and International Monetary Fund agreed to lend it hundreds of billions of euros (dollars) in return for economic austerity reforms.
Tsipras promised to boost the minimum wage, increase taxes on the rich and freeze a major privatisation drive designed to raise 19.5 billion euros ($24.2 billion) in state asset sales, a key condition of its bailout deal.
Tsipras's stance has raised speculation that Athens could be forced to leave the eurozone if the reforms falter, raising fears for the future of the single currency.
However, the 37-year-old radical leftist leader has said Greece can stay in the eurozone.
He likened the loan agreement to a "deadly medicine" which has caused a "tragedy" in Greece, where more than a million people are jobless and suicides are mounting in an economy now in its fifth year of recession.
"You don't save a patient's life by changing the dosage of a deadly medicine. You need to change the medicine itself," Tsipras said.
Earlier, conservative leader Antonis Samaras said on Thursday if Greece rejects the 130-billion-euro (104 billion pounds) rescue package meant to dig it out of a debt crisis the country will be plunged into a nightmare that it cannot control.
"Denouncing the bailout will lead to an exit from the euro and Greek living standards will drop by a third in very little time. It will be a real nightmare," Samaras told supporters, outlining his 18-point economic policy platform.
"Those who talk of denouncing the bailout are like little children playing with matches in a gunpowder warehouse and they are driving us towards an isolated Greece."
Although he did not name SYRIZA, his leftist rivals, by name, his comments were aimed at rebutting the radical party's proposals to keep the euro but ditch the bailout, the conditions of which it believes are too harsh.
Three surveys for Greek media by pollsters RASS, KAPA and ALCO placed New Democracy just ahead of Syriza, which the polls also showed had gained the most support in the past week ahead of the June 17 polls.