PM Tsipras at Syntagma calls on voters not to erase four years of achievements

The stakes involved in the Sunday national elections is high and "Greeks will decide on their lives, their future and their dignity," said Prime Minister and SYRIZA party leader Alexis Tsipras, speaking at his main pre-electoral rally at Syntagma Square, on Friday evening, ahead of the Sunday vote.

Tsipras said that main opposition New Democracy "wants to erase the moments of national pride and dignity Greeks lived right here four years ago," referring to the January 2015 national elections and the bailout referendum held by SYRIZA on July 5, 2015.

"I heard (ND leader Kyriakos) Mitsotakis being ironic towards people who were here at this square four years ago," said Tsipras, and added that "they cannot get over that night when fear was crushed."

He said that "the technocrats of the troika (Greece's creditors) do not decide about us anymore," and that "we are here, free and proud, because we averted the impoverishment of our people."

The Prime Minister noted that SYRIZA "is again asking for the people's mandate to continue," and said it will be "the first time to be judged on our own program," for a Greece, he stressed, that is "contemporary, free, self-sustained, dominant and progressive."

The SYRIZA leader said said that 400,000 new jobs have been created since 2015, and added that "we took over a country in which one million people had lost their job in five years," yet we "raised the minimum wage, restored the collective labor agreements, and tackled undeclared work."

""We are today in the ninth consecutive trimester of (national) growth," added Tsipras, and highlighted that "'foreign investments are at a ten-year high, while exports, industrial production and tourism are all performing excellently."

Tsipras also stressed the steps taken to strengthen Greece's role in Europe, the Balkans and the northeastern Mediterranean, and said that "'we ask for a mandate that will see an even stronger Greece, in Europe and the world, a Greece that builds alliances (...) a Greece that no one can blackmail, or violate its sovereign rights in the Aegean Sea or the Mediterranean."