Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras will attempt, at a cabinet meeting this afternoon, to reverse the negative political climate after SYRIZA plunged in two recent opinion polls.
Confronted with rapid fire political developments, the continuous backlash from the Greece-FYROM agreement, the return of refugees to Greece, and the defence minister and junior coalition partner Panos Kammenos’ threat to leave the government if the FYROM accord goes to parliament, the PM will try to shift the political agenda, focusing on the bailout exit and measures to help vulnerable social groups.
The fear of new MP defections (there was one last week) from Kammenos’ Independent Greeks and it decimation in the polls due to the FYROM accord, has troubled the PM’s office.
The government has signaled that it has support from other parliamentary parties’ MPs to ratify the Greece-Fyrom agreement, for which a simple majority is necessary.
Governmental narrative
Tsipras is expected to again maintain that Greece will have a clean exit from the bailout memorandum, and to revel in the extension of a VAT tax discount for five Aegean islands that receive most of the refugees at first.
While SYRIZA MPs voted for the medium-term programme and its pension cuts, now some are promoting a plan to offer a thirteenth annual pension check to compensate.
