GREEK workers are staging an unprecedented two-day general strike today and tomorrow, called by the GSEE (Greek TUC) against Yiorghos Papandreou’s government’s Mid-Term Economic Plan Bill, which is to be discussed in the Vouli (Greek parliament) during these next two days.
Workers and the Popular Assembly square protesters in Athens are organising an encirclement of the parliament building, with hundreds of thousands of people along with lorries and other vehicles.
Town halls around the country are planned to become ‘centres of resistance’ for workers’ and youth’s local mobilisations.
On the eve of the two-day general strike, intense and heated political discussion broke out on Sunday night at the meeting of the Popular Assembly.
Two proposed resolutions aimed at defining the demands of the Assembly were read out, but then it was decided that there won’t be any discussion in preference of planning Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s mobilisations.
Several Americans of the Freedom Flotilla to Gaza were present last Sunday and expressed their solidarity with the general strike struggle.
Four government parliamentary deputies have stated or indicated that they would not vote for the Bill, thus reducing the government majority to just one.
There has been much pressure by the European Commission and the IMF on opposition parties to vote with the government.
European Commission officials have claimed that if the Mid-Term Bill is not passed, then there will be no further financial aid to Greece and the country would collapse.
Greek Deputy Prime Minister Theodoros Pangalos stated in an interview to the Spanish newspaper El Mundo that ‘tanks will be in the streets to protect the banks from people demanding their money’.
Pangalos’s threatening remarks created fury at last Sunday’s Popular Assembly in the Vouli square in Athens, with people shouting ‘let the tanks come, we’ll show them!’
The Greek government is also threatening to use the ‘national emergency law’ against the electricity and power workers’ trade union, who have been waging a week-long national strike against the privatisation of the Public Electricity Corporation (DEH).
Under this law workers are obliged to go back to work under the pretext of ‘national security’.
The Greek police officers’ union, the port police officers union and the firefighters’ union sent a joint letter to the Popular Assembly declaring their support to the struggle against the government’s Mid-Term Bill.
ENDS