BRUSSELS -
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.
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.
Πηγή: nytimes.com
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