Greeks go to new polls next month

A senior judge was sworn in yesterday as Greece’s caretaker Prime Minister with the sole task of holding new elections in June after an inconclusive ballot on May 6.

Panagiotis Pikrammenos, the 67-year-old head of the Council of State, the country’s top administrative court, is naming his Cabinet today, when the new Parliament is also scheduled to convene.

Mr Pikrammenos was appointed after Greek political parties failed to form a coalition government following elections in which no clear victor emerged.

The political uncertainty in Greece has raised fears among the country’s international creditors, the EU and the IMF, that structural reforms pledged in return for bailout loans, will be delayed or even scuppered.

Radical leftist Syriza, the party most likely to win the next election to be held on June 17, wants to tear up Greece’s EU-IMF loan agreement and overthrow labour and salary reforms it rejects as “barbaric”. In fact the leader of Greece’s left-wing Syriza bloc accused the EU and German Chancellor Angela Merkel of “playing poker with European people’s lives”, in an interview with the BBC yesterday.

The bloc’s leader Alexis Tsipras told the BBC that if the “disease of austerity destroys Greece, it will spread to the rest of Europe”.

He said that banks were making big profits at the expense of people in Greece, but also in Spain and Italy, who were finding life increasingly hard.

“Therefore the European leadership and especially Mrs Merkel need to stop playing poker with the lives of people,” Mr Tsipras said.

In general elections on May 6, voters deserted the main Pasok and New Democracy parties which had supported tough austerity measures included in a €240-billion EU-IMF deal.