In a development spurring calls for a new “anti-bailout movement,” the Greek Parliament early Friday approved a controversial €85 billion financial rescue package—the country’s third such bailout from foreign creditors in five years, and one that will require the Greek people to endure further cuts and austerity.
“After more than seven hours of often passionate, bad-tempered debate, all through the night, the Greek Prime Minister, Alexis Tsipras, has got his way,” the BBC reported.
“I do not regret my decision to compromise,” Tsipras said as he defended the deal in parliament. “We undertook the responsibility to stay alive over choosing suicide.” He admitted to lawmakers the deal was no triumph, “but we are also not mourning over this difficult agreement. I have my conscience clear that it is the best we could achieve under the current balance of power in Europe, under conditions of economic and financial asphyxiation imposed upon us.”
The bailout bill, which Greek Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos described during the all-night session as “a tough agreement, with many thorns,” passed by a comfortable majority. The government needed the bill to pass in time for Tsakalotos to head to Brussels to meet his Eurozone counterparts, who will decide later Friday whether to approve the draft agreement.
“But the vote laid bare the depth of anger within Tsipras’s leftist Syriza party at austerity measures in exchange for 85 billion euros in aid,” Reuters reports, “as 43 lawmakers—or nearly a third of Syriza deputies—voted against or abstained.”
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Former Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis was among the Syriza members to vote against the deal. Earlier this week, he said: “Ask anyone who knows anything about Greece’s finances and they will tell you this deal is not going to work.”
Meanwhile, a statement signed by more than a dozen Syriza dissenters is calling for people across Greece to mobilize and form a “united movement” for democracy and social justice. The bailout deal, they say, “reverses the Greek people’s mandate that went against neoliberal policies on the July 5 referendum.”
By a 62 percent majority, the Greek people on July 5 rejected a bailout offer from foreign creditors that would have imposed further austerity and economic hardship. The bailout deal approved by the Greek Parliament on Friday is considered even harsher than the one that was on the table in July.
“We need to continue on the path of July 5 until the end, until we overthrow the bailout policies, with an alternative plan for the next day, for a democratic Greece, reconstructed and socially just,” the statement reads. “We call for the creation of a nationwide movement, by establishing committees against the new Memorandum, austerity and the country’s new guardianship.”
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