Brussels, 20/06/2012 (Agence Europe) - The Conservative Antonis Samaras, leader of the New Democracy party, was sworn in on Wednesday 20 June before the president of the Greek republic, Carolos Papoulias. He then stated that he could assemble a majority of 179 seats out of 300 at the Greek parliament, with the support of the PASOK Socialists and the moderate Left, the Democratic Left (Dimar). According to The Wall Street Journal, the future finance minister will be none other than Vasilios Rapanos, non-executive president of the Greek national bank.
The job that awaits this new government, highly anticipated by the creditors of the country, will be a tough one. New Democracy campaigned on the promise to renegotiate the memorandum agreement with the troika (IMF, ECB and European Union). But for the victor in the general elections, there is no question of touching the substance. The French daily newspaper les Echos stated that New Democracy wants to speed up privatisations and get rid of more civil service jobs than had been agreed with the troika, bringing this number to 200,000. In return for this, the Samaras government wishes to “renegotiate certain resources and timetable elements of the memorandum”. On Tuesday, the president of the Eurogroup, Jean-Claude Juncker, intimated that Athens could be given more time (see EUROPE 10637), but this idea was rejected the next day by those close to the German chancellor, Angela Merkel. On Wednesday the Spiegel website revealed that a key ally of Merkel, Valker Kander, was ruling out the possibility of granting Athens any concessions but on the contrary, was calling on the country to speed up the pace of reform. The Greek dossier is on the agenda of the Eurogroup this Thursday (see other article). (EL/transl.fl)