ATHENS — Main opposition Syriza-Progressive Alliance leader Alexis Tsipras urged people to do everything possible so that 2021 will be a year of a salutary change in the country's course, in an article in the newspaper "Efimerida ton Syntakton" on Thursday. He also cricitised the government's "absolute failure to handle an admittedly difficult situation," so that the future now appeared even more uncertain.

Tsipras noted that as the world passed from 2020 to 2021 "the tragedy of the pandemic is present and closely followed by the pandemic for the economy." He noted that society was in state of siege as millions of people feel trapped between the pandemic and economic extinction.

He said that the National Health System has reached if not exceeded its limits while the vaccine on which were all hopes have been pinned, even if effective, needs many months to create the necessary immunity.

Tsipras underlined that the government has failed and accused it of criminal irresponsibility to the degree where it not only rules out the alternative but is paving the way "with its policy, obsessions, repression and authoritarianism, for the next mistakes that may lead the country to tragedy". He also accused the government of using the crisis "to impose a regime of authoritarian post-democracy of the elite…"

He said that a process is already developing where the majority of society understands what it is losing, what it has and furthermore what it deserves and this "is the main reason we can, through today's darkness, discern the light and be optimistic."