SYRIZA toils to complete list for MEP elections

SYRIZA has delayed until next week a meeting of its political secretariat to decide the last of its 42 candidates for the May 25 European Parliament elections after awarding the penultimate spot to veteran leftists and World War Two hero Manolis Glezos.

The 91-year-old on Friday defended his decision to take up the challenge despite his advanced age. The SYRIZA MP gave two reasons for his decision.

“In this dark age we are living in, I have no right to be absent,” he said. Glezos added, however, that being an MEP would give him a better platform from which to make a case for Germany paying Greece war reparations.

“My brothers in arms who were lost in battles, executed or died unsung are calling me to represent them,” he said.

SYRIZA has run into a number of problems trying to complete its list of candidates, having named all but six at the beginning of last week. Its political secretariat was due to meet on Friday to discuss the last remaining place on the party’s ticket and the fallout from the decision to withdraw the candidacy of Thrace-based Roma activist Sabiha Suleiman.

The leftists sought to turn attention on New Democracy on Friday as they cited an article by one of the conservatives’ Euro candidates, publisher Giorgos Kyrtsos. SYRIZA asked for ND to comment on Kyrtsos’s assertion that Greece’s 2013 primary surplus is “essentially nonexistent since it is not based on the country’s economic and fiscal performance.”