Greece's socialist government rushed yesterday to push through Parliament a fresh round of spending cuts in the face of public anger at the price to pay for the €110 billion international bailout.
Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou has insisted the austerity package was essential to secure the joint eurozone-International Monetary Fund rescue package.
But Greek unions have vowed to battle the drastic round of austerity measures, worth some €30 billion and including deep cuts to wages and pensions.
Union leaders have flagged up a general strike tomorrow as the first stage in resistance to the government's austerity programme.
Newspapers said the day after the cuts were unveiled that they marked the end of an era in Greece and beginning of years of painful sacrifices.
"Our way of life, of working, consuming and organising our lives in this part of the Balkans is finished since yesterday," the pro-governmental Ta Nea newspaper said in an editorial.
The main headline of the independent left-leaning Eleftherotypia read "Four years without a breath..."
Mr Papandreou, in a speech to his cabinet on Sunday, made it clear the cuts would run deep: But he was clear too about what he believed was at stake.
"I know that with the decisions today our citizens must suffer greater sacrifices," he said.
"The alternative however would be catastrophe and greater suffering for us all."
The €110 billion bailout to dig Greece out of its debt crisis is bigger than the deal agreed to salvage bankrupt Argentina in the 1990s.
European governments end-orsed the deal at a meeting of finance ministers in Brussels on Sunday.
The first installment of the eurozone-IMF rescue package would then be paid within the next few weeks, with the rest spread over three years and conditional on the cuts and tax rises in Greece.
That should mean the first payment will be in the Greek coffers ahead of the May 19 deadline for €9 billion of debt repayments.
IMF managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn said on Sunday that the Fund's executive board was set to approve its part of the deal, €30 billion, within the week.
"The authorities' programme is designed with fairness in mind," he said of the government's cuts. It would include more progressive taxation; a clampdown on tax evasion with closer checks on the rich.
Athens would also exempt the most vulnerable from cuts in wages and pensions, said Mr Strauss-Kahn. And there would be a "significant reduction" in military spending.
But Yannis Panagopoulos, President of the million-member strong GSEE union, denounced the government's plan as the "most unfair and hardest measures in the modern history of Greece".
The austerity plan would only "worsen the recession and plunge the economy into a deep coma", he warned.
"It's time to step up the social battle, our general strike tomorrow will be the beginning of a long battle."
In exchange for emergency loans, Greece has agreed the new cuts over three years with the aim of slashing the public deficit to less than three per cent of output by 2014, from 13.6 per cent last year.
Finance Minister George Papaconstantinou said the government would scrap 13th and 14th month bonus wages for public sector workers and pensioners; raise the retirement age for women from 60 to 65, bringing it in line with that for men; and raise the sales tax from 21 per cent to 23 per cent this year.
Rocked by violent street protests at home, Greece has been under heavy pressure to cut a massive public deficit that has shaken the euro, rattled markets and sparked fears of contagion to other debt-ridden European countries.