Finland's parliament in favour of forcing Greece out of the euro, says report
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Version 0 of 1. Finland’s parliament has decided it will not accept any new bailout deal for Greece, media reports said Saturday, piling on pressure as eurozone finance ministers tried to find a way out of the impasse. The decision to push for a so-called “Grexit” came after the eurosceptic Finns party, the second-largest in parliament, threatened to bring down the government if it backed another rescue deal for Greece, according to public broadcaster Yle. Under Finland’s parliamentary system, the country’s “grand committee” – made up of 25 of 200 MPs – gives the government a mandate to negotiate on an aid agreement for Greece. Members of the committee met for talks in Helsinki on Saturday afternoon to decide their position, YLE reported. But the parliamentary officials have declined to comment on the media report. The finance minister, Alexander Stubb, was at the crunch eurozone talks in Brussels and tweeted that he could not reveal the mandate given to him by the grand committee so long as the negotiations were still ongoing. “The mandate is not public and the Finnish delegation will not discuss it publicly,” Kaisa Amaral, a Finnish spokesman, told AFP. The Brussels talks were set to resume on Sunday after failing to reach an agreement on Saturday but opinion among northern and eastern European countries appeared to be hardening against accepting the reform’s Greece has offered in exchange for another bailout. Finns party leader Timo Soini, who is also the country’s foreign minister, has repeatedly argued in favour a “Grexit”, saying it would be better for Greece to leave the euro. Finland is one of several EU countries whose national parliaments must sign off of any debt deal for Greece. The aim of Saturday’s Eurogroup meeting was for ministers to come up with a final verdict on leftist Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras’s proposals for a third rescue package ahead of yet another make-or-break EU summit on Sunday. Amid German warnings that the talks were “extremely difficult”, the German finance ministry has drawn up an “internal paper” for Greece to leave the eurozone for five years if it failed to improve its bailout proposals. The paper was not distributed in Brussels. |