Former prime minister, George Papandreou, gave a speech on the pressure exerted on him by his European partners in April 2010 to impose severe austerity cuts, at an event held in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Papandreou even revealed the dialogues he had with the European leaders, which led him to take the most difficult decision of his life, as he stated stressing especially that the agreement was signed within 10 minutes.
“April 2010, a Sunday evening, I’m in a meeting with my European counterparts. I had just been elected Prime Minister of Greece. But I had the sad privilege of discovering that my country’s deficit was not 6% of the GDP, as officially declared by the previous government a few days before the election, but much larger, reaching 15.6%,” Papandreou said and described what he lived that night:
“We were not given much time. Imagine yourself at the negotiating table in Brussels. Extremely difficult negotiations, the progress is extremely slow, the tension soared. And all this was happening at two in the morning.”
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