- European leaders and Greece have reached a deal to bail out Greece and keep the country in the eurozone.
- The deal allows for talks on a new assistance package for Greece, but should let the European Central Bank to provide badly needed emergency funding.
- Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said a fund “to the tune of” 50 billion euros would be created to use proceeds from selling off state assets.
- The Greek Parliament will be required to approve the terms of the deal “without delay.”
‘Bailout Was More to Serve Northern Banks Than Southern Peoples,’ Euclid Tsakalotos Told Irish
Euclid Tsakalotos, Greece’s new finance minister, might not be a hate figure to the European right like his predecessor, Yanis Varoufakis, but he has been warmly embraced by the European left because of his own blunt language on the need to forge an alternative to austerity.
As soon as Mr. Tsakalotos’s appointment was announced on Monday, supporters of Sinn Fein in Ireland pointed out that he was enthusiastically welcomed by party activists when he spoke at their political conference in March in Northern Ireland.
Greek Govt's new Finance Minister is lead bailout negotiator Euclid Tsakalotos, who addressed SF Ard Fheis in Derry pic.twitter.com/V3Qb8X9G4C
— An Phoblacht (@An_Phoblacht) July 6, 2015
Having strongly opposed the bailout of Ireland’s banks, Sinn Fein hopes to follow the Syriza party’s lead in channeling resentment about severe austerity into success at the polls in the next Irish election.
In his address to Sinn Fein activists in March, Mr. Tsakalotos described the negotiation between Greece and its creditors as part of a wider political struggle between left and right across the Continent.
“We will be seeking to negotiate a new deal to address Greece’s nonsustainable debt,” Mr. Tsakalotos, an Oxford-educated economist, said in March. “No economy that has lost a quarter of its G.D.P., has 25 percent of its population unemployed and over 50 percent of its young people unemployed, and has one-third of its population facing extreme poverty can be expected to repay its debt with a succession of years of very high primary surpluses.”
“Some European governments will be arguing that we should not give problematic Greeks special treatment, but you know that we are not asking for special treatment,” Mr. Tsakalotos said. “Greece has had the biggest per capita fiscal adjustment of any economy since the crisis began; hardly special treatment, especially when you consider that the bailout was more to serve northern banks than southern peoples.”
Speaking of the European governments that have insisted on austerity in the face of a recessionary spiral, Mr. Tsakalotos told Sinn Fein activists, “Their fear of Syriza has more to do with the aspirations of their own people for social justice and a new model of socially inclusive development; it is you that they fear, not us.”
“I am sure that the Irish people will draw the right conclusion about not only the desirability of change, but its feasibility,” he concluded. “You have nothing to fear but fear itself.”