European finance ministers fail to agree on unlocking long-delayed emergency aid for Greece
The failure of European finance ministers to agree on unlocking long-delayed emergency aid for Greece, after unprecedented efforts to satisfy international conditions for the rescue funds, was met on Wednesday with anger and dismay in Athens. With the near-bankrupt country living on borrowed time, the inability of officials to sign off on the financial lifetime or agree on how to make Greece's debt mountain more sustainable exacerbated an explosive political atmosphere.
In a rare display of pique, prime minister Antonis Samaras issued a scathing statement reminding Greece's eurozone partners that Athens had carried out a series of deeply unpopular reforms, including spending cuts of €13.5bn (£10.85bn), in return for the assistance. Prior to the meeting Greek officials had expressed the hope that finance ministers would at the very least draw up a timetable for the disbursement of a projected €44.6bn in bailout funding now desperately needed to energise an economy running on empty.
"Greece has done what it had to and what it had committed to doing," Samaris said on learning of the deadlock after marathon talks in Brussels. "Our partners, along with the IMF, must also do what they have undertaken to do. Any technical difficulties in finding a technical solution do not justify any negligence or delays."
The leader, whose tripartite coalition has become increasingly shaky amid deepening disgruntlement over the way the crisis has been handled, will press his case when he holds discussions on the sidelines of a two-day EU summit with Jean Claude Juncker, who presides over the eurozone group of finance ministers, aides said.
Juncker, prime minister of Luxembourg, emerged from the 12-hour long euro meeting expressing disappointment that a solution to prop up the 17-nation bloc's weakest member had still not been found. Acknowledging that the sustainability of Greek government debt remained the stumbling block, he commended "the considerable efforts made by the Greek authorities and citizens to reach this stage".
The praise did little to allay fury among Greece's political elite. Throughout the day politicians, including Samaras's two junior partners, reacted with anger to the news that the cash injection, delayed since June, had once again been put on hold.
With the country's coffers practically dried up and its real economy mired in a recession not seen since the second world war – mostly as a result of austerity measures mandated by international creditors – the deadlock was widely viewed as deeply humiliating for a government that has sought so strenuously to meet foreign lenders' demands in the five months since it assumed power.
Against a backdrop of mounting fears of a social explosion – with support for the euro plummeting among Greeks from 81.6% before the June general election to 63% this week according to a GPO opinion poll – Evangelos Venizelos, whose socialist Pasok party is a member of the power-sharing alliance, lambasted the eurozone for "using Greece as an alibi to justify its own weakness to effectively deal with the various manifestations of the crisis". The issue of Greece's debt viability had been on the table since February, said Venizelos, who as former finance minister negotiated Greece's second bailout accord with the EU and IMF.
Piling the pressure on the government, the main opposition leader, Alexis Tsipras, denounced the failure as further proof that Athens' conservative-dominated government had been left helplessly watching events from the sidelines.
"Europe finds itself before the dead end that its political choices have created," said the politician whose stridently anti-bailout radical left Syriza party is leading in the polls. "Day by day it is confirmed that the path of [the bailouts] is catastrophic for the European structure and painful for the people of Europe."
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