Syriza

Former Prime Minister and former leftist SYRIZA head Alexis Tsipras was elected as president of the Council of Europe's Sub-Committee on the Western Balkans with 80% of the vote.

Tsipras' opponent was conservative Zsolt Nemeth, a member of the Hungarian National Assembly.

The Athens prosecutor's office has ordered an investigation into SYRIZA head Stefanos Kasselakis' shipping business interests in the United States after documents revealed that he has owned a company abroad.

The ruling party, New Democracy (ND), maintains its leading position despite a slight decrease to 29.5%, as revealed by a public poll conducted by SKAI TV and Pulse in the final week of February. Meanwhile, the main opposition party, leftist SYRIZA, and the social democratic party, PASOK, are tied for second place at 12%.

SYRIZA opposition leader Stefanos Kasselakis plans to overhaul the party in a statutory congress following June's European Parliament elections, he said in an interview with the Real News newspaper on Sunday.

Main opposition SYRIZA has called on the government to brief Parliament whether there are conditions attached to the sale of F-16s to Turkey by the United States, following a relevant statement regarding their procurement by Ankara on Friday by US Senator Bob Menendez without proper terms. 

SYRIZA MP Pavlos Polakis criticized his former leader Alexis Tsipras over some of the remarks he made at a Kathimerini-sponsored conference Saturday.

In his remarks at the conference, Tsipras said that his government's management of the Novartis case (regarding allegations of bribery involving politicians and doctors) and the issuing of television licenses "was unfortunate."

If the Bank of Greece were not independent, Greece might have exited the eurozone in 2015, Yannis Stournaras, then as now the central bank's governor, said Saturday.

This past weekend SYRIZA held a four-day convention that was filled with drama and chaos, with both its identity as well as its leadership being challenged. With a new leadership race narrowly avoided, the question remains if there is a leader in the fragmented center left that can unite the opposition.

New Left attacks gov't at founding conference

New Left head Alexis Haritsis attacked the government's handling of the deadly Tempe train collision at his party's first conference.

The party, a splinter from leftist SYRIZA, was founded in early December and currently holds 11 seats in parliament.

One of the areas where Greece made some of its greatest strides during the past 50 years has been in foreign policy, the second day of the "50 Years of the Metapolitefsi" conference heard on Friday.