“The Social Contract party is more than ready for the elections and aspires to cause a major upset blocking the ‘one-way street’ of austerity, recession and unemployment and promote a reconstruction plan that will lead the country out of the crisis,” party president Louka Katseli on Thursday stressed.

Speaking in a televised press conference, she said she was in favour of post-election cooperation with progressive center-left forces and other political parties “in support of a strong majority government that will implement a mutually acceptable reconstruction plan”.

Katseli stressed that the dilemma “memorandum or absence of governance”, set before the people, is false, adding that if PASOK and New Democracy (ND) govern together to implement the memorandum recipe will only deepen the crisis and lead the country to a cessation of payments. She also said that the “euro or drachma” dilemma, raised by former prime minister George Papandreou, is equally false.

She strongly criticized PASOK’s leader Evangelos Venizelos and ND’s Antonis Samaras saying that “the economic policy of the second memorandum and the commitments undertaken by the two leaders will lead the average household to great poverty”.