SYRIZA-Progressive Alliance “will come to power to create, to build infrastructures of trust, meritocracy, accountability and transparency,” said party leader Alexis Tsipras on Tuesday.
The main opposition party leader was speaking at the ‘ygeiamou 2023 – A Modern People-Centred Health System’ health conference, organized by ygeiamou.gr and Proto Thema newspaper.
Tsipras argued that “the situation in the public health system three years after the pandemic is dramatic,” and that “it is perhaps the worst time for the country’s NHS since its establishment.”
He spoke further of what he said are understaffed hospital departments, clinics that suspend their surgeries, waiting lists of several days in regular surgeries, a heavy burden on nurses and medical staff who have suffered burnout, the brain drain phenomenon, and staff who leave the NHS because they cannot stand “inhuman conditions,” he noted.
Tsipras added that in the last three years “we have had 4,000 fewer health workers per year, 12,000 fewer in total.” As far as the coronavirus pandemic is concerned, he said Greece “did not do exceptionally well,” as “we are among the worst in hard indicators, in the ratio of deaths per million population in the Western world.”
On his dismissal of the party’s MP and former minister Pavlos Polakis as the party’s sector head for transparency following a series of social media posts by the MP for Crete, and Polakis’ referral to the party’s Ethics Committee for potential disciplinary proceedings against him, Tsipras said that “when we have a government that hasn’t left anything standing, I will not allow this debate to take place right now -with Polakis’ responsibility- for a post made by him. I too have a responsibility to protect my party and move forward to win the elections.”
The party’s protocol “allows me, being the party president, to impeach an executive member, if I think it protects our collective effort,” Tsipras noted, adding that the party president is not an ethics body to impose penalties.
There are “established ethics bodies, but they allow the president to assume a protective role – when he judges collective positions and the collective effort,” he added, therefore “he [Polakis] is being referred to the ethics committee because he published some positions in the middle of a pre-election period that are far from our collectively elaborated positions on how we will deal with the problems of the state, and the problems that relate to the functioning of the institutions.”
On Wednesday, SYRIZA will present its policy program for the protection of primary homes, unserviceable loans and personal debt.
SOURCE; ANA-MPA
