Tsipras: 'Support for workers or a labour jungle; these are the stakes in these elections'

Visiting the facilities of the Athens Water Supply and Sewerage Company (EYDAP) in Keratsini on Thursday, SYRIZA-Progressive Alliance leader Alexis Tsipras told the staff that he intends to "highlight the crucial issue of the public good called water".

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Talking about the upcoming elections on June 25, he said that labour issues will be one of the main issues at stake, promising that SYRIZA will support safety and security at work, restoring collective bargaining and re-establising the Labour Inspectorate.

He also accused the previous government of having effectively raised taxes but chiefly the unfair indirect taxation through VAT and the consumption tax for fuels, which had the greatest impact on those with low incomes, while handing tax breaks to the rich.

Regarding the possibility of privatising water, Tsipras said that this issue impacted the lives of all people, not just the water company workers, and repeated that the upcoming elections will decide "real differences in policy not in communication".

"Which party governs has to do with what programme and what plan governs...preserving public goods is not a Leftist obsession," he noted, saying that a fundamental difference between the programmes of SYRIZA and ND "is that we believe there are some goods that must be under public control, that not all things can be bought and sold in this life.""

According to Tsipras, the views of ND and its leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis "are that even water can be an object of commercial exploitation" and he pointed to legislation passed after the accident at Tempi creating a regulatory authority for water "which is a first step toward the privatisation of water".

According to SYRIZA-PA's leader, the international experience has shown that the privatisation of water "has failed everywhere" and creates social problems, including public health impacts.

Tsipras promised to return the Athens and Thessaloniki water companies to public ownership after the elections and said that EYDAP's network was not being properly maintaned due to a lack of staff.

He concluded by appealing to workers to join forces to overturn the result of the May 21 elections and bring about "a victorious result for the benefit of society."