Greek PM Appeals to Lawmakers to Back Tough Reforms

July 10, 2015 Share Print 0

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras appealed to his party’s lawmakers on Friday to back a tough reforms package after abruptly offering last-minute concessions to try to save the country from financial meltdown.

After walking into a party meeting to applause, Tsipras rallied his Syriza lawmakers to throw their weight behind the new proposals ahead of a snap vote in parliament on the negotiations, urging them to help keep Greece in the euro.

“We are confronted with crucial decisions,” a government official quoted Tspiras telling his Syriza lawmakers.

“We got a mandate to bring a better deal than the ultimatum that the Eurogroup gave us, but certainly not given a mandate to take Greece out of the eurozone,” he said. “We are all in this together.”

It is unclear whether all the creditors would back the latest reforms package, which was strikingly similar to the terms Greece had rejected in a referendum Tsipras had called in June. Germany sounded wary, with a finance ministry spokesman ruling out any debt reduction that would lower its real value.

But France, Greece’s strongest supporter in the euro zone, rushed to offer praise with President Francois Hollande calling the offer “serious and credible”. Eurogroup head Jeroen Dijsselbloem called it a “thorough piece of text” but declined to go into specifics.

via Reuters

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Alfonso Esparza

Senior Currency Analyst at Market Pulse

Alfonso Esparza specializes in macro forex strategies for North American and major currency pairs. Upon joining OANDA in 2007, Alfonso Esparza established the MarketPulseFX blog and he has since written extensively about central banks and global economic and political trends. Alfonso has also worked as a professional currency trader focused on North America and emerging markets. He has been published by The MarketWatch, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal and The Globe and Mail, and he also appears regularly as a guest commentator on networks including Bloomberg and BNN. He holds a finance degree from the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education (ITESM) and an MBA with a specialization on financial engineering and marketing from the University of Toronto.