After three days of heated debate, Greece’s new government received a vote of confidence late on Tuesday as the country steeled itself for crucial negotiations with the creditors keeping it afloat.
Alexis Tsipras, the firebrand catapulted to power on the back of fierce opposition to the austerity endured by the nation in recent years, easily won the motion with 162 votes. Some 137 MPs rejected the call. Nikolaos Michaloliakos, the leader of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn abstained citing illness.
Addressing lawmakers before the ballot, Tsipras pledged his government would immediately get to work. Measures Athens had been forced to enact in return for aid would be reversed, he said, as euro area finance ministers prepared to open talks on the country’s economic future in Brussels on Wednesday.
“Greece cannot go back to the era of memoranda and submission,” the radical leftist said in a hard-hitting speech that singled out the German chancellor Angela Merkel and her finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble for particular criticism. “We will enforce our pre-election commitments. They have to understand that elections have taken place. This is the people’s will. There is no way back.” The defiant speech – the second in as many days – appeared to put Greece on a collision course with its creditors.
Tsipras, who was elected promising to excise austerity and write down the country’s monumental €320bn (£237bn) debt, reiterated that his government could in no way accept to extend its current bailout agreement with the EU and IMF.
Instead, it would insist on being given a bridging agreement, he said, at Wednesday’s euro group to grant Greece “the time and space” to avoid a funding crunch and come up with a new plan to keep insolvency at bay.
“We will [attend the talks] with the most positive of energy,” he said, assuring deputies that far from being eurosceptic, his Syriza-led government was fiercely pro-European.
Barely two weeks into the job, the new government seems resigned to accept that a clash with its European counterparts is almost certainly on the cards.
Earlier on Tuesday, Schäuble emphasized that Greece had to respect the loan accord signed by the previous government if it wanted to avail itself of the last tranche of aid foreseen in its €240bn (£178bn) financial assistance program – the biggest bailout in global history. At €7.2bn (£5.3bn) the installment is vital to the government covering costs and meeting looming debt repayments. “We are not negotiating a new program. We already have a program,” the German finance minister quipped before adding that if Athens didn’t want it “then, that’s it”.
The Greek finance minister bracing himself for what will likely be a stormy session – the emergency meeting is being held solely to discuss Greece – said by force he had to prepare himself for the worst. “If you’re not willing to consider a clash, you’re not negotiating,” he told the 300-seat parliament on Tuesday. “We’re not seeing a clash. We will do everything to avoid it. But you’re not negotiating if you’ve ruled it out,” he said.
In his own address before the house, former prime minister Antonis Samaras exhorted the new government to change tact, saying he feared it was leading the country “straight to the rocks” of financial disaster.
