Editorial: Stragglers

13:29 17/12/2018 - Πηγή: Τα Νεα

The government’s 2015 electoral pledge to raise the monthly minimum wage to 781 euros immediately after it would come to power proved to be a pipe dream.

Citizens who believed that promise were fooled, as were those who voted for SYRIZA with the hope that it would abolish the bailout

memorandum and that their standard of living would return to pre-crisis levels.

Clearly, the minimum wage is not sufficient to cover basic living needs in Greece.

It is impossible for those needs to be met with the wage hikes promised by the government, which of course are a far cry from the older pledges of the ruling party when it was in its early period of self-deception.

Our country will remain at the tail end of eurozone member-states, and Greeks who are in the lower economic brackets of salaried employees will remain the poor relatives in the family.

Never before has a government cultivated so many hopes, only to belie them all.

For that reason alone, one would have expected the government to press forward with policies that will stimulate the economy, first of all in order to support our fellow citizens who bore the brunt of the impact of the economic crisis.

In short, economic policy must be decided with those who are economically weakest in mind, and not with the vote-mongering rationale of past decades.