The All-workers Militant Front (PAME) sealed the three-day strike which began with a 2-day strike on the 6th and 7th of May and continued yesterday with the 1-day strike of May 1st, which due to Orthodox Easter has been moved to the 8th of May, by organizing a particularly mass demonstration in the evening of Sunday 8/5. This demonstration expressed the people's opposition to the law-guillotine for social security and taxation, shortly before it was passed through the full session of Parliament.

The GS of the CC of the KKE, Dimitris Koutsoumpas, made the following statement to the media at the rally in the morning."130 years ago, the workers of Chicago and later their successors shed their blood for the rights of their class. Today, capital and its governments are trying to take back all those gains, which the workers of our country and the whole world had won with their blood. We must not allow them. The working class, the labour movement in our country and Europe, internationally, must regroup, must gather its forces together and launch a new counterattack. The temporary retreat, the great difficulties that we face today must not lead us to disappointment and fatalism. The workers, the peoples have the strength. They must utilize this strength. The KKE, the class-oriented labour movement and the rest of the people's movement in Greece and all over the world are struggling in this direction."

In the evening of the 8th of May, thousands of people once again gathered at the meeting points organized by PAME in order to participate in the rally outside Parliament, at the time when the discussion on the law-guillotine was concluding. This law provides for new tax burdens for the working class and popular strata and the further demolition of social security. In the end, the SYRIZA-ANEL government with 153 votes out of the 300 MPs in Parliament passed the anti-people law, despite the hammering they received from the MPs of the KKE. Speaking in parliament,  D.Koutsoumpas stressed: "The struggle does not end here. The people will show their real strength."

At the same time outside parliament, where thousands of people had gathered, there was an attempt by the provocateurs and the forces of repression to disperse the large rally and to force the peoples out of Syntagma sq., creating an atmosphere of tension with Molotov cocktails, tear gas, stun grenades, thrown into the rally, under the pretext of "dispersing" the "hooded ones", who previously had literally been pushed by the police forces onto the demonstrators in Amalias Avenue. This attempt, which had been denounced in parliament by the Parliamentary Group of the KKE, did not succeed. Then the Parliamentary Group of the KKE, headed by the GS of the CC of the party, Dimitris Koutsoumpas, left parliament where the discussion on the social security law was continuing and united with the demonstrators amid loud applause.

09.05.2016