Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras will next week have his first meetings with eurozone leaders since taking office, striving to assure them he will honour a pledge for more austerity and gauging whether they could grant him more time to pull it off.
We’re all having a difficult time. There will be more hardship
Having recovered from eye surgery that has prevented him travelling since June, Samaras will fly to Berlin and Paris to meet German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande. Earlier, he will meet eurozone chief Jean-Claude Juncker, a Greek government source said.
“The dates are not official yet, they will be announced soon,” said the official on condition of anonymity.
Samaras will insist he can ram through an austerity package worth about €11.5 billion – a key condition to continue receiving EU/IMF bailout funds and avoid default and a possible exit from the currency club.
Greece is falling short of the budget cut and reform promises it made in March to obtain a second €130 billion bailout from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. This has led to calls by politicians in its biggest lender, Germany, for the country to be ousted from the eurozone.
“Our key priority is to regain our credibility by showing our determination,” the government official said.
Greece has yet to nail down the requested austerity package. The bulk of the cuts will come from state salaries and pensions, and up to 40,000 public sector firings, further angering an austerity-weary public that often takes to the streets. The coalition’s two leftist junior partners have also opposed any further cuts.
Samaras is already preparing public opinion for yet more suffering.
“We’re all having a difficult time. There will be more hardship,” he said on Monday from his southern Greek home region of Messinia, where he spends the Assumption holiday.
EU officials told Reuters last month that Athens was way off its bailout targets, was unlikely to be able to pay what it owes and further debt restructuring is likely to be necessary if it was not to be abandoned.
In a bid to offer suffering Greeks some hope, Samaras will use his talks next week to raise a long-standing proposal that the measures be spread over four instead of two years, to soften their impact on a Greek economy enduring its longest and deepest recession since World War II.
No formal request will be made but the proposal will be broached as part of exploratory talks, the official said. “The matter of extension is already being debated in Greece and abroad. Its official submission is a different matter.”
A two-year extension to narrow the budget deficit below three percent of GDP in 2016 instead of 2014 was a key plank of Samaras’s campaign for the June 17 election that brought him to power as head of a fragile three-party coalition.
Samaras and his junior coalition partners, the Socialist Pasok and the moderate Democratic Left party, adopted the promise under pressure from the radical leftist, anti-bailout Syriza, which suddenly rose from the political fringe to become the main opposition party.
But Samaras and his finance minister Yannis Stournaras put the demand on the back burner after meeting EU/IMF inspectors in Athens last month, realising that no concessions would be considered until the lenders were convinced of their commitment to austerity – a big task given repeatedly missed targets and broken promises over the past two years.