ATHENS: Greece Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras spoke to the leaders of Germany, France and the Europea Commission by phone on Sunday in an attempt to break the deadlock over a cash-for-reforms deal as time runs out to save Greece from bankruptcy.
After months of wrangling and with anxious depositors pulling billions of euros out of Greek banks, Tsipras’s leftist government has signaled a willingness to make concessions in order to unlock 7.2 billion euros in bailout money.
But a day before an emergency summit in Brussels, it is still unclear how far Tsipras, elected in January on a pledge to lift his people out of years of austerity, will yield.
His Syriza party plans a rally in Athens to send “a loud message of resistance” against demands for more cuts and tax hikes in a country battered by years of recession.
But the mood has also hardened in Germany, which has contributed more money than any other country to bailing out Greece. German Chancellor Angela Merkel is under pressure from within her ranks not to give in to Greek demands, even if that means contemplating Greece leaving the euro zone.
Athens urgently needs access to funds to avoid defaulting on a 1.6 billion euro IMF loan that falls due at the end of the month. But as the crisis gets pushed from one meeting to the next, each side has put the responsibility on the other’s shoulder for finding a deal.
