Greece prepares reform plans but cracks appear in Syriza party

Greece’s government prepared reform measures Sunday to secure a financial lifeline from the eurozone, but was attacked by one party member for selling “illusions” to voters after failing to keep a promise to extract the country from its international bailout.

Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has insisted Greece achieved a negotiating success when eurozone finance ministers agreed to extend the current bailout deal for four months on Friday, provided Athens came up with a list of reforms by Monday.

Tsipras maintains he has the nation behind him despite giving ground to Greece’s European creditors. Under the deal, Greece will still live under the terms of the existing bailout, which he had pledged to scrap, for another four months. Greece wants to use that financial breathing room to then negotiate a new lending arrangement by early summer.

The existing bailout is overseen by the EU, the IMF and the European Central Bank – known as the “troika.”

“I want to say a heartfelt thanks to the majority of Greeks who stood by the Greek government … That was our most powerful negotiating weapon,” he said on Saturday. “Greece achieved an important negotiating success in Europe.”

Despite bending to many Eurogroup demands, Friday’s deal eased apprehension that Greece could leave the eurozone — the feared “Grexit” — and averted a possible run on Greek banks and the country’s free-fall into insolvency. 

But not all members of Tsipras’s Syriza party, a broad coalition of the left, were as sanguine about the terms of Friday’s agreement.

Veteran leftist and Syriza party member Manolis Glezos attacked the deal as failure to fulfill campaign promises. “I apologize to the Greek people because I took part in this illusion,” he wrote on his blog. He said the extension of the current bailout package for another four months had merely changed the semantics, not the underlying terms, including the composition of the bailout monitors and the original agreement. “By renaming the troika ‘the institutions,’ the memorandum as ‘agreement’ and the lenders as ‘partners’ . . . you do not change the previous situation,” he wrote.

Glezos, a Syriza member of the European Parliament, is not seen as a party heavyweight. But he commands moral authority: As a young man under the World War Two occupation, he scaled the Acropolis to rip down a Nazi flag under the noses of German guards and hoist the Greek flag, making him a national hero.

In response, a government official said Glezos “may not be well informed on the tough and laborious negotiation which is continuing.”

Meanwhile, Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis said the reform promises made as a part of Friday’s agreement would be ready on Sunday and submitted. “We are very confident that the list is going to be approved by the institutions and therefore we are embarking upon a new phase of stabilization and growth,” he told reporters late on Saturday.

A government official said the reforms would include a crackdown on tax evasion and corruption.

The Brussels deal opens the possibility of lowering a target for the Greek primary budget surplus, which excludes debt repayments, freeing up some funds to help ease the effects of 25 percent unemployment and pension cuts. It also avoids some language that has inflamed many Greeks, angered by four years of austerity demanded by foreign creditors.

The so-called “troika” of inspectors, which monitors compliance with Greek bailout undertakings, is now referred to as “the three institutions.”

Tsipras declared Greece was “leaving austerity, the bailouts and the troika behind.” Nevertheless, “the three institutions” must still approve the government plans.

The opposition pounced on the apparent climb-down from promises that have raised expectations among Greeks. “No propaganda mechanism or pirouette can hide the simple fact that they lied to citizens and sold illusions,” said Evangelos Venizelos, leader of the socialist PASOK party.

Venizelos was deputy prime minister in the last conservative-led coalition that succeeded in raising funds from financial markets with two bond issues last year. With the economy showing signs of growth after a depression that wiped a quarter off GDP, it had prepared to exit the bailout program but lost power to Syriza on Jan. 25.

Friday’s agreement merely buys time for Greece to seek a long-term deal with the other eurozone members.

Tsipras needs to keep public support during that time, and the initial reaction in Greece appears to show support for Tsipras’ Syriza party. Costas Panagopoulos, who heads the Alco polling firm, said there was relief that Greece would stay in the euro. Greeks might even accept Tsipras’s change in language and assertions that the troika is no more, he said.

“It may sound odd but this could turn into political gains,” he told Reuters.

Al Jazeera and Reuters