Brussels, 17/06/2013 (Agence Europe) - On Monday 17 June 2013, the European Commission asked the Greek coalition government to assume the responsibilities that have been given it by the Greek people because political stability is needed for implementing reforms and restoring the country's economy, said Commission spokesman Olivier Bailly.
The three political parties will be meeting on Monday evening to try to find a solution to the deadlock since the sudden closure of the country's state television company, ERT, last Tuesday (see EUROPE 10865) by the Greek prime minister, Antonis Samaras, without agreement from the other two coalition parties, Pasok and Dimar. The latter parties agree that the television company needs to be restructured but, at the weekend, they rejected a compromise offered by Samaras that would have allowed an immediate, but partial, re-opening of ERT.
During a conference of his party, New Democracy, on Sunday, Samaras said he wouldn't leave the country in instability. Sweeping aside the idea of the coalition government collapsing and erasing a year of progress by forcing early elections, Samaras sent the ball back into his partners' court. He told them that the current dilemma is about knowing whether or not reforms were going to be made and who would be responsible for supporting or preventing them. The prime minister said that cutting 2,000 members of staff from the public sector by the end of this month, as agreed with the country's international lenders, had been signed up to by all three heads of the coalition parties. He asked where the jobs were to be lost if it were not from the bloated ERT, a bastion of special privilege and lack of transparency.
The crisis has emerged at a time when fact-finders from the country's troika of lenders (European Commission, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund) are in Athens to assess implementation of the reform package. The European Commission, and more recently the German government, says that the temporary closure of ERT in order to restructure it had never been discussed by Greece and the troika. The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, spoke with Samaras on Sunday by telephone, assuring him of her support and encouraging him to pursue the reform package. (EL/transl.fl)