PASOK leader heralds party overhaul

PASOK leader Evangelos Venizelos on Friday heralded the «reestablishment» of his beleaguered socialist party, which suffered a drubbing in recent general elections following two years of austerity policies.

Addressing a party summit, Venizelos tried to put a positive spin on the outcome of the June 17 elections, in which Pasok garnered a meager 12 percent of the vote, noting that «the small but resilient percentage of PASOK is not what has been left from the majority percentages of older contests but the yeast from which the recreation of the party will emerge.»

Accusing others of «abandoning ship like rats» while he and other party officials took difficult decisions, the socialist leader said that the time had come for the party to surpass its difficult phase and move on.

He added however that the roots of PASOK would not change. «We are proud of our name and of our symbol,» he said.

Venizelos indicated too that the socialists were looking toward a country free of the tutelage of foreign creditors. «The Greece that we dream of is an autonomous Greece,» he said, adding that the future of Europe was one and the same with the future of the Social Democrat movement.

Ekathimerini.com