Greece’s Prime Minister has made a last-minute bid to secure unity in his increasingly fractured Syriza party, with the offer of an internal referendum this Sunday.
At a meeting of the party’s 200-strong central committee in Athens, Alexis Tsipras said that rebel MPs should either support him or come out into the open.
“Whoever thinks there can be a better government or Prime Minister, then they should speak up,” Mr Tsipras said in his opening address to the party’s governing body.
The vote, which would ask dissenters in the party whether or not they supported his plans to reach a deal with the country’s creditors, would precede, and possibly negate, an emergency party congress due to take place in September.
Mr Tsipras has been struggling to hold the party together since pushing through a bailout plan in the wake of a national referendum earlier this month. In a parliamentary vote days after the referendum, 38 of Syriza’s 149 MPs voted against the plan because of what they saw as its pandering to the austerity measures sought by the IMF.
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Seventeen lef-wing Syriza MPs resigned from the central committee ahead of a vote over the Sunday referendum. One of the resigning MPs, Dimitri Kodelas, said the committee was in danger of simply “signing off” on Mr Tsipras’s policies.
Many officials indicated that a September conference would be preferred to a vote on Sunday to avoid exposing Syriza’s internal wounds. “We’re headed to a congress where with a democratic dialogue we’ll evaluate... our course from now on,” state minister Alekos Flabouraris told The Independent outside the meeting.
The scale of infighting within Syriza has threatened to fracture the party and the ruling coalition, with senior officials indicating that early elections may be inevitable.
Mr Tsipras faces a war on many fronts. Representatives from the international creditors are in Athens to check on the measures the country needs to enforce to get negotiations over its third bailout started.
Meanwhile, his former finance minister is under investigation. Parliament is set to determine whether there are grounds to indict Yanis Varoufakis following revelations of a plan to establish an alternative currency in the event of Greece leaving the eurozone.
