ADVERTISEMENT

Tsipras Makes Official Request to Start Greek Snap Election

Tsipras Makes Official Request to Start Greek Election Process

(Bloomberg) -- Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras met Monday with President Prokopios Pavlopoulos to make an official request for a general election following his defeat in European Parliament’s ballot last month.

The prolonged pre-election period in Greece “bares dangers for the course of the Greek economy,” Tsipras said after the meeting in Athens with Greece’s Head of State, making the request for national elections to be held.

Pavlopoulos will now issue a decree to dissolve the current parliament ahead of the national vote scheduled for July 7.

The lame-duck premier later Monday made his election pledges for the election, saying his program will focus on labor issues, tax-relief and social welfare policies. Tsipras promised to boost the minimum wage, currently at 650 euros, by 7.5%, create 500,000 new jobs and reduce the lowest income tax rate by 20%.

Tsipras’s four-year term doesn’t officially end until October. However, Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s New Democracy party pummeled the ruling Syriza in the European Union poll, winning by 9 percentage points. That left Tsipras little choice but to call a snap ballot. He’s hoping an early election can limit the damage for Syriza. The leftist party has been hemorrhaging support for some time.

To contact the reporters on this story: Paul Tugwell in Athens at ptugwell1@bloomberg.net;Eleni Chrepa in Athens at echrepa@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Sotiris Nikas at snikas@bloomberg.net, Jerrold Colten, Robert Jameson

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.