Brussels, 27/04/2016 (Agence Europe) - On Wednesday 27 April, the President of the European Council, Donald Tusk, called for a Eurogroup meeting to be held at the earliest opportunity to finalise the negotiations between Athens and its institutional creditors in the framework of the first monitoring mission of the third week bailout plan.
“Earlier today I talked to (the Greek Prime Minister) Alexis Tsipras. I am convinced that there is still more work to be done by the ministers of finance. We have to avoid a situation of renewed uncertainty for Greece. Therefore we need a specific date for the meeting in a not distant future. I am not talking about weeks but days”, he said, following a meeting with the Albanian Prime Minister (see other article).
By allowing the Eurozone finance ministers to take charge, Tusk has not responded to the Greek request to convene a Eurozone summit. There is currently no emergency characterised by an uncontrollable situation such as the one in summer 2015, when Greece temporarily came out of the second bailout plan without the ability to refinance itself alone on the markets. Athens, whose public accounts showed a primary budgetary surplus (not including servicing the debt) of 0.7% of GDP in 2015, remains financed until July, when it will have to deal with an insurmountable reimbursement peak of €3.5 billion in debt securities.
In Berlin on Wednesday, the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, also said that it was not currently appropriate to call a Eurozone summit, according to the news agency ANA-MPA.
The sticking point of the negotiations lies in the drafting of measures equivalent to 3.5% of GDP (€3.6 billion) required by the creditors of Athens and to be applied only if Greece deviates from its budgetary trajectory aiming for a primary budgetary surplus of 3.5% of GDP in 2018 (see EUROPE 11538). The Greek government argues that no provision is made for measures of this kind in the memorandum it agreed to in August 2015, as the words 'contingent' and 'contingency' do not feature in it. Hence its calls for a European summit to reconfirm this. As the Greek finance minister, Euclide Tsakalotos, said in Amsterdam last week, the Greek authorities are not opposed to such measures being set in place, but they would like them to be drawn up in as few details as possible. They fear that they will not be able to convince the parliamentary majority of the government coalition led by Syriza, which consists of just three seats, to vote through additional unpopular measures such as pension cuts or the lifting of income tax exemptions.
Substantial progress in the putting together of these prior measures and in talks on Greek debt relief, which are supposed to be carried out in parallel, would have allowed the Eurogroup President, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, to convene a ministerial meeting. “The meeting on the first monitoring mission, the prior measures and the debt has been postponed”, his spokesperson tweeted on Tuesday evening.
The European Commission remains optimistic. “We believe that all conditions are there to find a solution very soon”, said the High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs, Federica Mogherini, presenting the Commission's new strategy for the Arctic region (see other article).
Over at the European Parliament, the leader of the S&D group accused certain “hawks” of blackmailing Greece by imposing additional measures on it to be applied if necessary. “We should all work to prevent a crisis in Greece in the run-up to the British referendum, especially now that - under extraordinarily difficult conditions - Greece has over-performed on its primary balance target for 2015”, said Gianni Pittella (S&D, Italy), in a press release. He called for a Eurozone summit to be held next week in the event that the talks stall. (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)