ATHENS – Backtracking on some of his pledges to renegotiate key terms of harsh austerity measures demanded by international lenders in return for rescue loans, Greece’s new Prime Minister Antonis Samaras outlined his economic recovery plan to Parliament on July 6, saying he will not demand major changes but will still try to tweak conditions of the bailouts.
In his first major policy speech since he took office after his New Democracy Conservatives narrowly won the June 17 elections, but without enough of the vote to form a government, forcing him to create a coalition with his bitter rivals, the PASOK Socialists, and the tiny Democratic Left party, Samaras pledged to turn around the country’s economic crisis which has been worsened by pay cuts, tax hikes and slashed pensions insisted upon by the Troika of the European Union-International Monetary Fund-European Central Bank (EU-IMF-ECB) which put up $152 billion in a first series of rescue loans and is readying a second for $173 billion.
Samaras said he would accelerate the pace of long-delayed privatization programs, including the sale of state-owned entities and sale or lease of state properties, despite criticism from Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA) leader Alexis Tsipras, whose party finished a close second in the elections that Greece will be selling off its holdings for a song and fire sale prices.
Samaras said he would concentrate on trying to convince the Troika to back off over some of its demands on austerity, which has created 22.6 percent unemployment, shrunk the economy by 6.7 percent and led to the closing of 1,000 businesses a week but would still stick to what it has insisted upon. Athens Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ACCI) President Constantinos Michalos earlier in the day told the BBC that the hard line taken by the Troika, which wants another $15 billion in cuts, will lead to the closing of another 36,000 businesses this year and to the worsening of the country’s economy, not helping it.
Samaras said he will try to meet the Troika’s program. “We don’t want to change the targets,” he told Parliament. “What needs to change is that which is hampering us from attaining the targets. We want to fight the recession.” But he was short on specifics. He conceded that Greece has missed critical targets in its bailout deals, the first of which he opposed when PASOK was in power, and the second he supported when he was sharing a brief hybrid government with his rivals before the elections. He said he would do all that he could to insure Greece is not forced out of the Eurozone of the 17 countries using the euro as a currency.
Samaras, trying to satisfy the Troika and Greek voters, said open talk by some EU leaders that Greece could leave the Eurozone was hindering privatization efforts and said the austerity measures he supported and signed before he opposed them have to be scrapped, although he didn’t say where Greece would get the money to continue paying hundreds of thousands of needless workers, some 150,000 of which the Troika wants fired over the next three years. “We can’t be trying to restart the privatizations, attract investments, while foreign officials publicly speak about the possibility of Greece returning to the drachma,” he explained.
“With this uncontrolled recession, the program’s funding needs are rising. We want this to stop and to start getting out of this dead end,” he said. “This is the subject of our ‘renegotiation,’” he said, without explaining why he supported the measures that worsened the recession or why he has now changed his mind again.
Samaras said that the country’s deficit reduction efforts have failed and that some of the reforms the Troika wants might take longer than anticipated, despite warnings the money pipeline could be shut off if Greece veers from its agreement. The government “aims to pull the country out of the crisis, correct the mistakes that were made, make up for lost time,” Samaras said. It will focus on selling state assets, such as the country’s railway company, and liberalizing the energy market. Parliament is to debate the policy statement and hold a vote of confidence in the new government at midnight on July 8. With 179 of the legislature’s 300 seats held by the coalition, the government is expected to easily pass the vote.
(Sources: Kathimerini, Reuters, AP)
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