Greece’s creditors are skeptical over the leftist government’s willingness and ability to implement the reforms required in order to grant the country a third bailout package.
Greek Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos had a hard time trying to persuade his Eurozone peers that Athens is determined to proceed with the reforms needed to save the country from bankruptcy and recover from a five-year economic crisis.
However, Eurozone Finance Ministers expressed reservations whether Greece can implement reforms after several Ministers and lawmakers of the country’s coalition government essentially voted against the Greek proposals and asked Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras not to sign an agreement that includes austerity measures such as supplementary pension cuts and tax hikes. Some of them have openly expressed the opinion that Greece should leave the common currency bloc and the European Union altogether.
The issue of trust toward the Greek government has been brought up, with several Eurozone Finance Ministers telling their Greek counterpart that they don’t fully trust the Greek government. Greece, they said, must do a lot more than present a list of reform commitments.
“We are still a long way out, both on the issue of content as on the tougher issue of trust,” Eurogroup President Jeroen Dijsselbloem said on his arrival to the Finance Ministers’ emergency meeting on Saturday. “On paper it is not good enough yet — and even if it is good on paper, then we still have the question: will it really happen?”
Germany, Greece’s biggest creditor and Europe’s most powerful economy, appears indifferent to the possibility of a Grexit at this stage. Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble does not seem optimistic that Greece can convince the rest of the Eurozone countries – most of all Germany – and secure the three-year bailout program it proposed, which is estimated at 74-90 billion euros.
“We will definitely not be able to rely on promises,” Schaeuble said. “We are determined to not make calculations that everyone knows one cannot believe in.” He was referring to previous proposals Greece has made in the past five months that ranged from insufficient to unrealistic.
Schaeuble also criticized the current SYRIZA-ANEL government that took over in January based on a anti-austerity campaign for not showing the willingness to implement reforms. He blamed the coalition for driving the Greek economy to the brink, saying that the progress made by the previous conservative government toward getting out of the economic crisis has been “destroyed in the last months.”
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