With the government having voting into law pension cuts as of 1 January, 2019, it is now considering giving retirees one extra pension check annually to counterbalance the painful measure.
“We do not forget the 13th monthly pension. For us it is a condition for the future. We believe that we must defend to the end the pensions of the Greek people,” said Alternate Social Solidarity Minister Theano Fotiou.
Regarding the surplus of the EFKA state social insurance fund, Fotiou said that, “The government has proven that it was able to create a super-surplus in a system which for 40 years had an annual deficit of one million euros.”
“With the new structure of the insurance system, we proved that the state can support senior citizens who worked, and those who worked for a shorter time, with a national pension, with a viable system that is not perpetually loss-making,” Fotiou said.
“They [the opposition] propose a private insurance system – that is their conviction – of the sort that collapses, leaving people without pensions and with nothing. We propose a public insurance and pension system,” she noted.
“For us, pensions are emblematic. In 2016, the prime minister symbolically spent a portion of the primary surplus that exceeded fiscal targets in order to offer a 13th pension check. For us this is a condition for the future. We believe that we must defend to the end the pensions of the Greek people,” Fotiou said.
“On the contrary, people in another world are not interested in the pensions of the Greek people, because they have private insurance policies. That ‘other world’, which showed a disinterest all these years and brutally cur pensions, today is taking us to task for ‘acting unilaterally’ [without consulting with creditors],” she underlined.
