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GreekReporter.comGreeceSteinbrüeck Wants Merkel To Back Off Greece

Steinbrüeck Wants Merkel To Back Off Greece

steinbrueckinathensGerman Chancellor Angela Merkel’s rival in this year’s election, former finance minister Peer Steinbrueck said she should relent on her tough stance on continuing austerity measures for Greece in return for continued international aid and give the country’s leaders more time to meet fiscal reform targets.
“Measures that would not be imposed on our own people should not be imposed on another country,” Steinbrüeck told reporters during a visit to Athens. “This is why Greece needs time to succeed in its stabilization and for people to regain confidence,” the former finance minister said, adding: “Austerity alone cannot bring results.”
Greece is imposing pay cuts, tax hikes and slashed pensions for a fourth consecutive year in order to keep bailouts coming from the Troika of the European Union-International Monetary Fund-European Central Bank (EU-IMF-ECB) which has insisted on them. Germany is the biggest EU contributor.
Many Greeks blame Merkel for the unrelenting pressure on them as the country’s recession, now in a sixth year, has worsened and austerity has created a record 26.8 percent unemployment rate and led to the closing of more than 68,000 businesses in three years.
“We must see how social cohesion can be maintained,” the center-left Social Democrat Steinbrüeck said, Agence-France-Presse reported, noting that Greek salary earners and pensioners had already suffered cuts in their incomes of 30 to 40 percent. Social unrest over the measures has strengthened the hand of extremists, such as the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party.
The SPD candidate has called for a greater show of solidarity of Greece by the German government. In an interview with Der Spiegel magazine, Steinbrueck suggested that Merkel and fellow European leaders should have shown greater support for the debt-stricken country at the start of the crisis by guaranteeing its bonds.
“That would have sent a strong message to the markets and would have deterred attacks on the Eurozone, which lasted for two years,” he said. Steinbrueck also called for Merkel to “tell the truth” about what bailing out Greece would eventually cost German taxpayers.

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