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Greece approves controversial austerity bill

The anti-austerity protest was carried by masked youths outside the Greek parliament.

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Demonstrators outside the country’s parliament in Athens hurled petrol bombs, chairs and wooden planks at police, who responded by firing tear gas and stun grenades.

The vote in parliament on the reforms was originally scheduled for around May 10, but the government on Thursday made a decision to speed up procedures and bring them forward on Sunday night.

Trade unions opposed to the reforms are set to keep up the pressure with the third day of a general strike that has paralysed public transport across the country.

Police fired rounds of teargas during protests outside parliament in central Athens before the vote began, the night before a key Eurogroup meeting for Greece.

The reforms will reduce some pension payouts, merge several pension funds, increase social security contributions and raise taxes on those with medium to high incomes.

Ahead of the Brussels meeting, differences between the creditors themselves have emerged over extra reforms demanded by the International Monetary Fund that could amount to another 3.6 billion euros ($5.6 billion) of cuts by Greece.

Workers in Greece walked off their jobs Friday in protest of new tax and pension reforms being considered by the government that workers say will cut deeply into their incomes.

A positive sign-off on the reform review will unlock more than 5 billion euros to ease Greece’s squeezed finances and make debt repayments maturing in June and July.

Inside the parliament building, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras survived a crucial test of his wafer-thin majority, as all 153 of the ruling coalition’s lawmakers in the 300-seat parliament voted in favour of the changes. Tsipras is a member of an engineers’ association.

A taxi driver I met said he thought Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras was a strong leader and he understood that hard decisions were necessary to pull the country out of the financial crisis.

Greek Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos urged European Union ministers to support the reforms, warning that not doing so could produce a “failed state”.

Despite this, the Greek parliament went ahead and adopted the controversial and unpopular package of pension cuts and tax hikes on Sunday evening. All opposition lawmakers voted against the package.

The euro zone’s 19 finance ministers will gather in Brussels on May 9 to discuss Greece’s reform programme and a new set of contingency measures that Athens is asked to adopt to ensure it can achieve agreed fiscal targets in 2018.

“Nobody should believe that another Greek crisis, leading perhaps to another failed state in the region, could be beneficial to anyone”.

He also highlighted the fact that the Eurogroup meeting on Monday would for the first time look at easing Greece’s crippling debt burden, one of the only concessions granted to Mr Tsipras when he secured the bail-out.

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Mr Tsipras was elected on an initial anti-austerity pledge but later signed up to Greece’s third worldwide bailout since 2010.

Greece hit by general strike as gov't plans to push reforms