THE Greek government of Prime Minister Yiorghos Papandreou was set to be defeated in a confidence vote in the Vouli (Greek parliament) on Friday midnight.
The government’s parliamentary majority of four has drained away in the last two days.
Thousands of Greek workers and youth were demonstrating outside the Vouli yesterday demanding the overthrow of the government.
On Thursday night, some 1,000 public sector workers demonstrated in Athens, organised by the ADEDY (pubic sector trade union federation) whose banner stated: ‘Not a single vote of confidence to the politics of the Agreement’, referring to the EC-IMF agreement on Greece on October 27.
While workers were shouting ‘Neither a PASOK government nor a National Unity government – the time has come for the overthrow’, Papandreou was making a quite lengthy speech to the government parliamentary deputies.
But he just couldn’t say what he was going to do. It was left to the Finance Minister, E Venizelos, to state that the government was abandoning plans for a referendum on the EC-IMF agreement on Greece.
Papandreou was clinging on to power despite repeated calls by his own ministers to resign so that a ‘national unity’ government could be formed with the aim of pushing through the Vouli the barbaric EC-IMF agreement of more wage and pensions cuts and the sacking of hundreds of thousands in the public sector and in the civil service.
The leader of the right-wing conservative Opposition, Antonis Samaras, accused Papandreou of being a ‘liar and blackmailer’ in the Vouli and called for a ‘provisional transitional government’ which will push through the Vouli the EC-IMF agreement and then call a general election. Samaras said that his party won’t be joining this ‘provisional government’ which must be a short-lived one.
Papandreou accepted Samaras’ plan but he indicated that he wants to remain the Prime Minister of such a government. But a number of government deputies have actually called for a ‘personalities’ government headed by banker Loukas Papadimas, an official advisor to Papandreou and, up to a few months ago, vice-president of the European Central Bank.
On orders from their masters in Brussels, the Greek ruling class are conspiring to install a bonapartist non-elected government to push through the EC-IMF Agreement in face of massive resistance by the Greek working class and youth.
The leaders of the KKE (Greek Communist Party) and of the Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA) have rejected the calls for a ‘national’ or ‘provisional’ government and are insisting on an immediate general election; but neither of these two parties have called for the overthrow of capitalism and for workers’ power.
The Greek Trotskyists of the Revolutionary Marxist League (RML) have called for the organisation of a political indefinite general strike to bring down a non-elected ‘personalities’ or ‘national’ government.
The RML calls on workers to form people’s assemblies and councils of action to organise the fight for the overthrow of capitalism and to build a revolutionary party to lead workers and small farmers to power.
