Kevin Ovenden in Greece on those parliamentarians who voted No to austerity
Posted by John, July 11th, 2015 - under Kevin Ovenden.
Tags: Austerity, Greece
Kevin Ovenden has just posted a Facebook status about the 32 MPs who voted No to austerity. He says:
The NO vote in the parliament was 32 MPs.
Of those 2 are of the Red Network in Syriza (one of them a member also of the International Workers Left [DEA], the main Trotskyist organisation in Syriza).
A further 13 MPs of the KKE (all their fraction) voted NO.
The Nazis of Golden Dawn, 17 MPs (all their fraction), also voted NO.
We should beware attempts to lump together opposition to the proposals as “extremist”. What is extreme is the proposals. The fascists, are pathological liars – it is required by their political position and strategy.
The government is in trouble. We were told it would secure a strong anti-memorandum position through coalition with ANEL.
The governing arrangement just broke as a stable set-up.
The Troika and Berlin will have their own views about what should happen and be demanded of Tsipras *politically*.
No one on the left of the party is responsible for breaking an “anti-austerity” government’s majority. The government itself did that when it broke from the party’s programme – even its most minimal one: no more austerity.
Addendum – it is implicit throughout, but the two Syriza MPs who voted No should be congratulated, in my view, for doing the right thing. Three Die Linke MPs recently stood against the stream, including of their own party, to deliver an internationalist NO to austerity. There is an honourable tradition of representatives of the left finding themselves in a minority in an assembly on a matter of principle, only then to find – sometimes more quickly than they had anticipated – that they represent majority feeling in the society.