Greece Given Until Sunday to Settle Debt Crisis or Face Disaster
Frustrated European leaders gave Greece until Sunday to reach an agreement to save its collapsing economy from catastrophe after an emergency summit meeting here on Tuesday ended without the Athens government offering a substantive new proposal to resolve its debt crisis.
“The situation is really critical and unfortunately we can’t exclude the black scenarios of no agreement,” said Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, warning that those possibilities included “the bankruptcy of Greece and the insolvency of its banking system” and great pain for the Greek people. Also looming ever larger was the prospect of Greece leaving the European currency union.
Mr. Tusk said that the government of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras had until Thursday to deliver a new plan to Greece’s creditors.
“Until now I have avoided talking about deadlines,” Mr. Tusk, a former prime minister of Poland, told reporters after a day of fruitless meetings. “But tonight I have to say it loud and clear — the final deadline ends this week.”
“I have no doubt that this is the most critical moment in our history.”
Deadlines have come and gone without serious consequences, but yet another emergency gathering, this one involving all 28 European Union leaders in Brussels on Sunday, might really be a crunch point. “This could be the last meeting about Greece,” Prime Minister Matteo Renzi of Italy told reporters on Tuesday night.
And for the first time, “Grexit” — Greece’s exit from the euro — has surfaced as a serious option. Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, the European Union’s executive arm, said at a brief news conference late Tuesday night that his staff had drawn up plans for several possible outcomes.
“We have a Grexit scenario prepared in detail,” he said. Mr. Juncker expressed fury at a barrage of verbal attacks on Greece’s European creditors by officials of Syriza, the left-wing party, led by Mr. Tsipras, that won Greek parliamentary elections in January on a platform of rejecting the austerity policies that were a condition of European bailouts. He singled out a remark by the recently departed finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, accusing creditors of “terrorism.”
“Who are they and who do they think I am?” Mr. Juncker said, sputtering with rage. He asserted that he was “strongly against” Greece leaving the euro but “I cannot prevent it if the Greek government is not doing what we expect it to do to respect the dignity of the Greek people.”
At a separate news conference, the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, made it clear that eurozone leaders were determined to set a very high bar for Athens before the Thursday deadline. “There are only a few days left for a discussion on what’s going to happen in the future,” she said. “What we now need is a multi-annual program that goes far beyond the program that we discussed only 10 days ago.”
Asked if the eurozone would consider easing the debt burden on Greece — a key demand by Athens — Ms. Merkel emphasized that Greece would first be required to convince its lenders that it stood ready to meet the conditions for a new bailout.
The decision by Mr. Tsipras to hold a referendum on whether to accept previous terms set by creditors only made matters worse, Ms. Merkel added.
In comments to reporters after the meeting, Mr. Tsipras struck an almost sunny tone by contrast, saying that the talks had been held in “a positive climate” and that his government would continue efforts to secure “a final exit” from the crisis. “The process will be fast,” he said, “beginning in the coming hours with the aim of concluding by the end of the week, at the latest.”
Tuesday’s efforts to break the deadlock got off to an inauspicious start when Greece’s new finance minister, Euclid Tsakalotos, on his second day in the job after replacing Mr. Varoufakis, failed to present a detailed plan at a meeting of finance ministers called to review Syriza’s demands after Greek voters rejected previous terms on offer.
The failure to present concrete proposals turned what had been billed as a last-chance opportunity for Greece into another display of the substantive and stylistic gulf between Mr. Tsipras’s government and his country’s big creditors, starting with Germany and other European countries that use the euro.
Still, it appears that no one wants to take the blame for a Greek departure from the eurozone. That means that all sides seem ready to keep talking even as the crisis, which began more than five years ago, reaches new levels of intensity, and even as Greece hurtles toward a July 20 deadline to make a payment of 3.5 billion euros, or about $3.8 billion, to the European Central Bank. Many analysts say Greece cannot miss that payment without leaving the eurozone.
Nicolas Véron, a senior fellow at Bruegel, a research organization in Brussels, agreed that time was running out to keep Greece in the currency union. “If there is no progress whatsoever this week, the prospects for Greece staying in the eurozone would become grim,” Mr. Véron said.
The continuation of emergency financing for Greek banks by the European Central Bank “is clearly dependent on the likelihood of an agreement between Greece and its creditors,” Mr. Véron said. But if that source of aid is “stopped and no agreement is in sight, it is difficult to imagine a scenario in which Greece stays in the eurozone for long,” he said.
The day’s events continued what has become a pattern of crossed wires and mutual incomprehension between Greece and its creditors, frustrating expectations that the dismissal on Monday of Mr. Varoufakis, a combative former professor, might drain some of the poison or at least uncertainty from Greece’s tumultuous relations with the rest of Europe.
Yet Mr. Tsakalotos surprised his peers by turning up for the emergency meeting with only a vague outline of Greece’s proposal for breaking the long standoff. A person with direct knowledge of the talks, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the closed-door meeting, said that Mr. Tsakalotos had at least struck a far less abrasive tone than his predecessor and seemed open to constructive discussion.
Some of the finance ministers, summoned to Brussels on Tuesday for the sixth crisis meeting in three weeks, expressed deep frustration at what they considered a further delay by Greece. Late last month, Athens infuriated fellow European countries by calling off negotiations as they came close to yielding a deal and announcing a referendum on creditors’ terms that the Tsipras government then denounced as unacceptable and the work of “extremist conservative forces.”
In Athens, a Greek government official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive diplomatic matter, said the Greek proposals, once they arrived in Brussels, would be a revised version of measures submitted early last week in a letter from Mr. Tsipras to creditors. Those proposals largely matched the ones Mr. Tsipras called on Greek voters to reject. But the official, without elaborating, said the revised offer would reflect the outcome of Sunday’s referendum.
Shortly before meeting with Ms. Merkel and other leaders in Brussels, Mr. Tsipras spoke by telephone with President Obama and explained Greece’s position. The White House said that the president told the Greek prime minister that it was crucial that both sides reach “a mutually acceptable agreement.”
Mr. Obama also spoke with Ms. Merkel on Tuesday and the White House said the two leaders agreed that a deal to keep Greece in the eurozone was “in everyone’s interest.”
Greece’s departure from the euro would not necessarily destabilize other weaker members of the eurozone or spread havoc in global markets, which have so far reacted relatively calmly to Greece’s troubles. Yet it would upend one of the European Union’s fundamental principles, a commitment to “ever closer union” in place since 1957, and throw into reverse decades of steady integration.
Finance ministers were in some cases even encouraging the idea that Greece should leave. Janis Reirs, finance minister of Latvia, a small Baltic nation that endured its own grinding austerity program and has now returned to economic growth, indicated that a Greek departure might even be beneficial.
“If in a system there is an element that doesn’t work, the departure of this element won’t harm the system and in some cases can even be positive,” Mr. Reirs said in response to a question about whether Greece might have to give up the euro.
Ms. Merkel said the leaders of all European Union member states would attend the meeting on Sunday because any decision would affect future members of the single currency. The presence of leaders from the full bloc could also be needed to approve European Union humanitarian aid for Greece in case a bailout deal for the country remains out of reach.
Statement by Eurogroup President J. Dijsselbloem after the Eurogroup meeting of 7 July 2015
We welcomed our new Greek colleague and listened to his assessment of the situation after the “No” vote in Greece. There were no new proposals at this point from the Greek minister, and the first step will be that the Greek government will send the Eurogroup a new request; a new request letter for ESM support and as soon as this comes in – hopefully already tomorrow morning – we will have another Eurogroup conference call to formally start the process of dealing with this request. I will first ask the institutions to look at the financial situation in Greece, their finances and debt sustainability, and then the institutions will come back to us and we will see if we can formally start the negotiations. All this has to be done in a matter of days. We have very little time, as you are all aware. Thanks.
Source: European Council
Remarks by President Donald Tusk after the Euro Summit of 7 July 2015 on Greece
I will read out what was agreed by leaders at tonight’s Euro Summit:
1. We met tonight to discuss the serious situation in Greece. We noted that the euro area authorities stand ready to do whatever is necessary to ensure the financial stability of the euro area as a whole.
2. Following the Greek referendum, Prime Minister Tsipras committed to present a new request for a programme within the framework set by the ESM Treaty, including strict policy conditionality.
3. We agreed to urgently examine whether it is possible to establish a basis for finding an agreement that respects existing commitments and our common rules.
4. The Greek government will on Thursday 9 July at the latest set out in detail its proposals for a comprehensive and specific reform agenda for assessment by the three Institutions to be presented to the Euro Group.
5. The Heads of State or Government will meet on Sunday 12 July.
President Donald Tusk added:
Let me add a few words from my own perspective. All sides of the negotiations share the responsibility for the current status quo. That is why today I called on all leaders to try to find consensus, which will be our common success, with no losers or winners. If this does not happen it will mean the end of the negotiations with all the possible consequences, including the worst-case scenario, where all of us will lose. Our inability to find agreement may lead to the bankruptcy of Greece and the insolvency of its banking system. And for sure, it will be most painful for the Greek people. I have no doubt that this will affect all Europe also in the geopolitical sense. If someone has any illusion that it will not be so, they are naive.
The stark reality is that we have only five days left to find the ultimate agreement. Until now, I have avoided talking about deadlines. But tonight I have to say loud and clear that the final deadline ends this week. All of us are responsible for the crisis and all of us have a responsibility to resolve it.
Source: European Council
Source: New York Times – Greece Given Until Sunday to Settle Debt Crisis or Face Disaster
