Galery

1

Yes, my son and two children registered the movement of discontented as an event on Facebook, but he has nothing to do with its political establishment. The reality is that people needed the opportunity to say in a peaceful manner that they disagree with this policy and the measures imposed. The problem lies there - the government of George Papandreou, the European Union, and the IMF had to impose a very different policy from the outset. The pursued economic policies led to a recession and a decline in the private sector, although the problems come mainly from the public sector. The result of this policy was that it significantly raised the costs of the firms that were forced to cut staff, which led to increased unemployment, etc. In other words, they offered a model that was not successful. From the beginning, they had to take a program focused only on public sector cuts but not on tax increases.

We saw no drastic reduction in the public sector in the first Memorandum. The only thing we saw was the severely negative effect on the private sector, which did not cause the debt and financial crisis of the country. Moreover, civil servants are almost a million in a country that does not require more than 150,000 civil servants. If the public administration was reduced by 350,000 people in 2010, there would be no budget deficit in Greece today.

I would like to go back to the issue of the movement of discontented, which changed a lot in the past two months of its existence. Many of the people who are now screaming and yelling in front of the Parliament are the same people who benefited from the system over the past 30 years in one way or another – civil servants with big salaries and short working time, retired at the age of 50, or even party members. Do you think that the people, who took advantage of this vicious system yesterday, should come to the streets to protest today?

They are the main discontented and they have a fundamental right to be. There is a real chance to lose their jobs. You just have to understand that the discontented inside the movement have different interests. For example, discontented are those who are now paying higher taxes in order to enable civil servants to continue to receive salaries. Those people are protesting against the public sector and higher taxes. Then, we have the other side. These are the state officials who do not want to lose their job and want to continue to be part of the public administration. Discontented are the people who lost their jobs in the private sector to enable civil servants to remain in employment. Therefore, there is a serious conflict of interest within the movement in fact which is not noticeable at first glance.