Hopes that Greece can get a rescue…
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Some 8,000 anti-austerity demonstrators had been gathered outside the parliament building in the capital Athens to protest against more austerity, police said. Greece’s government is r…
“Greek TV is like a terrorist attack”, the woman says.
Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras appealed to his party’s lawmakers on Friday to back a tough reforms package after abruptly offering last-minute concessions to save the country from financial meltdown.
Parliament speaker Zoe Constantopoulou, Energy Minister Panagiotis Lafazanis and Deputy Labour Minister Dimitris Stratoulis also failed to endorse the government’s plans.
“It’s clear that certain countries, for reasons which are completely unrelated to reforms and the programme, don’t want a deal”, a Greek government official said. Opposition parties, however, helped push them through.
But the new proposal, if approved by Greece’s worldwide creditors, will provide longer-term financial support for a nation that has endured six years of recession.
Greece urgently needs a deal to avert bankruptcy and possibly crashing out of the eurozone.
An European Union source in Brussels said on Friday that the latest debt proposals from Athens – which closely resemble the last offer from its creditors before talks stalled – were “positive” enough to form the basis of a massive new bailout worth 74 billion euros ($82 billion).
Greece has received bailouts totaling 240 billion euros in return for deep spending cuts, tax increases and reforms from successive governments.
“There is no doubt that for six months now we’ve been in a war”, he said, adding that his government had fought “difficult battles” and had lost some of them. She wouldn’t guarantee that an agreement would be reached, saying, “We have to make sure the pros outweigh the cons – for Greece’s future, for the entire eurozone and the principles of our collaboration”.
Tsipras has made much of the need for a restructuring of Greek debt, which stands at around 320 billion euros, or a staggering 180 percent or so of the country’s annual GDP. But it was a stark indication of how against the party’s initial promise the proposals were, and could cause a problem for Tsipras’ coalition government. “We didn’t vote “No” to leave the eurozone”, said a pensioner in Athens, Nikos Eftekidis. “I am afraid of one thing: national division and civil war”.
European Council President Donald Tusk said the summit he will host in Brussels Sunday is a “last chance” for Greece and the EU to seal a deal. It would be the first country to do so, and the consequences for the country and global markets would be unpredictable.
Tsipras addressed lawmakers two weeks to the day after he went on Greek television to say that he was turning down the plan of the troika – the European Union, European Central Bank and the worldwide Monetary Fund – and convening a July 5 referendum on the path forward. Nina Schick, a European policy analyst, told Al Jazeera that negotiations could be hard when France and Germany had opposing positions, with Germany requiring more of Greece.
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The plan appears in a paper from the German finance ministry and calls for either the transfer of state assets or a temporary “time-out” from the eurozone.
