After easily winning re-election in a runaway rout to gain a third term, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose country is the biggest contributor to bailouts for Greece, said she will now return to tightening the screws on the Greek government to keep imposing more harsh austerity measures while ruling out any chance it will be able to write down its debt by not paying its loans back in full.
“We should not stop exercising pressure for the agreed reforms to be carried out,” said Merkel after a major election win for her CDU party and its Bavarian partner, the CSU. She has been demanding pay cuts, tax hikes and slashed pensions in Greece for three years in return for backing $325 billion in two rescue packages from the Troika of the European Union-International Monetary Fund-European Central Bank (EU-IMF-ECB).
Merkel also insisted that she told the truth about Greece’s predicament and the possible need for a third bailout, which was brought up during the election campaign by Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble when he said there’s a need for more money, estimated to be $11-$14 billion. Merkel said that too would come with more austerity although Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras said he would refuse to impose more on Greeks.
“This is not a new issue and we raised it repeatedly during the election campaign,” said Merkel, adding that Schaeuble had first raised the matter before a Parliamentary committee in November 2012.
Merkel won an overwhelming endorsement from German voters, putting the country’s first female chancellor on course for the biggest election tally since Helmut Kohl’s post-reunification victory of 1990
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