ATHENS, Greece (AP) -- Greek lawmakers voted overwhelmingly early Thursday to approve a harsh austerity bill demanded by bailout creditors, despite significant dissent from members of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras' left-wing party. The bill, which imposes sweeping tax hikes and spending cuts, fueled anger in the governing Syriza party and led to a revolt against Tsipras, who has insisted the deal forged after a marathon weekend eurozone summit was the best he could do to prevent Greece from catastrophically crashing out of Europe's joint currency. The bill was approved with 229 votes in favor, 64 against and six abstentions - and won the support of three pro-European opposition parties. The vote came after an anti-austerity demonstration by about 12,000 protesters outside parliament degenerated into violence as the debate was getting underway Wednesday night. Riot police battled youths who hurled petrol bombs for about an hour before the clashes died down.
The bill was the first step Greece must take in order to begin negotiations with creditors on a new bailout - its third in five years - of about 85 billion euros ($93 billion) in loans over three years.
Dissenters argued that Greeks could not face any further cuts after six years of recession that saw poverty and unemployment skyrocket and wiped out a quarter of the country's economy.
Tsipras has been battling all week to persuade party hard-liners to back the deal. He has acknowledged the agreement reached with creditors was far from what he wanted and trampled on his pre-election promises of repealing austerity, but insisted the alternative would have been far worse for the country.
2 comments:
Greece is now nothing more than a German bantustan. Along with Spain, Portugal and Ireland Europe is under the complete control of Merkel and Germany. France and Italy are as well but the progress toward transferring wealth from the middle and lower classes is not yet so far advanced. But for all intents and purposes there is Germany the "white South Africans" and rather than race determining who lives in the bantustans it is now class.
Tsipras had a chance to be Mandela and instead enslaved his people for generations to come. He willingly turned Greece into a bandustan of enslavement to Germany.
The Eurozone is dysfunctional, as a currency union without fiscal union. This ensures that there are constant ongoing cashflows from the weaker countries to the richer ones. So one could equally argue that this would only be just, for some of the 'debt' owed by the poorer to the richer countries to be treated as necessary transfers that had to be made for the stability of the union...
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