Greece Elections # Reading Passage
SECTION TWO QUESTIONS 15-22
Read the passage below and answer Questions 15-22 on the following page
On the very day that Greece received the first tranche of its new bailout from the European Union, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has decided to resign and call a general election, which will be held next month. Until then, the country will be led by a woman, Vassiliki Thanou-Christophilou, the president of Greece’s Supreme Court. On the face of it, Tsipras’s move seems premature. In the next few months, his government has much to do in order to meet the terms of the bailout and persuade its creditors to consider giving Greece some much needed debt relief. The election will complicate that timetable and will, inevitably, create more uncertainty about where the country is going. But, despite the risks it involves, Tsipras’s gambit was necessary for broader democratic and political reasons. When Tsipras did a U-turn last month and accepted the harsh bailout terms imposed by Germany, he created a big split in his Syriza party, which took office in January. About a third of Syriza’s members of parliament voted against the deal or abstained. Since then, the government has been ruling with the support of its coalition partner, a right-wing populist party called Independent Greeks. But Tsipras was facing a likely parliamentary vote of no confidence, which he wasn’t certain to survive, and a formal schism with anti-bailout members of Syriza, who have been talking about setting up their own party. Rather than engaging his internal opposition, the Prime Minister has chosen to try and outflank them by calling a snap election, which he hopes will bestow him with a new mandate.
That is probably a smart move, and it will also give the Greek public an opportunity to register their feelings, once again, about the bailout package and its attendant continuation of austerity policies. When last consulted, in the “Oxi” referendum, on July 5th, the voters overwhelmingly rejected the bailout terms being demanded by the E.U. and the International Monetary Fund, only for Tsipras and his colleagues to accept a similar deal a couple of weeks later, under threat of Greece being ejected from the eurozone. The upcoming election will effectively be a referendum on Tsipras’s decision to accept more austerity and more international supervision of Greece’s economy. “The political landscape must clear up,” the energy minister Panos Skourletis, an ally of Tsipras, said on Thursday. “We need to know whether the government has or does not have a majority.”
Since Greece is a very divided country, an outright majority for Syriza is an unlikely outcome. In its January triumph, which left it as the largest party in parliament, it won just thirty-six per cent of the vote. This time around, at least some of Syriza’s supporters are likely to support its dissident faction, which is led by the former energy minister, Panagiotis Lafazanis, who last week accused Tsipras of giving into an E.U. “dictatorship” and called for the creation of a new “united movement that will justify people’s desire for democracy and social justice.” It seems as though Lafazanis and his colleagues will campaign on the idea of taking Greece out of the eurozone and restoring the drachma, which, at least in theory, would give the government the leeway to pursue more expansionary monetary and fiscal policies.
This is a political debate Greece needs to have. For the past six months, some of Syriza’s supporters have been suffering from a form of cognitive dissonance. Perfectly understandably, they want an end to austerity policies; but they also want Greece to stay in the eurozone. If the dramatic showdown between Syriza and the country’s creditors demonstrated anything, it is that Greece and other E.U. debtor countries cannot have both of these things. Germany, with the support of the Benelux countries and many of the newer E.U. members from Eastern Europe, won’t allow it. In seeking reëlection, Tsipras, who, according to recent opinion polls, still retains a lot of popular support, will argue that he got the best deal possible. That’s what he did in his address to the nation on Thursday night.
It is now up to the critics of austerity, including Lafazanis and possibly even Yanis Varoufakis, the former finance minister whom my colleague Ian Parker profiled recently, to make the argument that an alternative set of policies, including a new Greek currency, is viable. If they proceed down this road, emphasizing the practicality of their program rather than simply criticizing Tsipras for capitulating, the election campaign could be interesting.
QUESTIONS 15-22
Do the following statements agree with the information in the passage?
In boxes 15-22 on your answer sheet, write
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if the information is not given in the passage
15. Greece will be led by a woman prime minister because the current one died.
16. The government of Tsipras was facing internal issues, however it managed to survive because of people’s support.
17. The demands of the bailout were rejected by everyone in Greece and has yet not been accepted.
18. Syrzia won a majority in the January elections.
19. Lafazanis are taking steps to take Greece out of euro zone, expecting to gain some monetary issues.
20. The debate proved that Germany won’t allow EU country that own money to have all the benefits.
21. The finance minister of Greece at present is Yanis Varoufakis.
22. The main task of the former finance minister is make alternative policies.
ANSWER
15. False
16.False
17.False
18. True
19. True
20. True
21. True
22. True