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Greek Parliament, After All-Night Debate, Passes Bailout Deal Greek Parliament Passes Bailout Deal, but Support for Alexis Tsipras Is Slipping
(35 minutes later)
ATHENS — Greek lawmakers approved their country’s third bailout plan in a parliamentary vote on Friday that relied on opposition party support and saw the government coalition suffer significant dissent. ATHENS — The Greek Parliament approved an international loan deal early Friday that the government needs to avoid defaulting on a debt payment next week. But the all-night debate and a growing rebellion within Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’s leftist Syriza party seemed to have pushed his coalition government closer to spinning apart.
The vote came after a marathon all-night session marked by procedural delays and acrimonious debate over the three-year rescue package for about 85 billion euros, or $95 billion, that includes harsh spending cuts and tax increases. Greece needs the money to avoid defaulting on its debts and to secure its future in the eurozone. The dissent may force Mr. Tsipras to soon call for a vote of confidence in his government.
Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has come under intense criticism from hard-liners in his radical left Syriza party for capitulating to the demands of Greece’s creditors to introduce the austerity measures, many of whom voted against the bill. The discord is threatening to split the party and could lead to early national elections. With 222 lawmakers approving the bill, 75 voting against or abstaining, and three absent, lawmakers signed off on a package that would grant Greece as much as 86 billion euros, or about $95 billion, clearing a path for eurozone finance ministers to ratify a deal in an emergency meeting on Friday in Brussels. The accord requires Greece to put in place strict spending limits, new tax increases and sweeping changes in the way it manages its economy.
Greece needed to pass the bill before a meeting of eurozone finance ministers in Brussels on Friday afternoon, where the ministers will decide whether to approve the draft agreement. But the terms, which also include raising the retirement age and opening various parts of the Greek economy to greater competition, have proved unacceptable to a growing number of lawmakers in Mr. Tsipras’s government.
The deal will also require the approval of parliaments in several other countries, including in Germany, Greece’s harshest critic, before any funds can be disbursed. Some nations, such as Finland, have already given their approval. While the measure received the support of some members of the opposition, it had the backing of only 118 lawmakers in the government coalition — fewer than the 120 lawmakers that Mr. Tsipras needs to survive politically.
Dissenters in Mr. Tsipras’s party angrily challenged the government, accusing it of reneging on anti-austerity promises it made before winning elections last January. Speaking after the vote, a government official said that Mr. Tsipras would call for a vote of confidence in his government after Aug. 20 — next Thursday — when Greece needs to repay a €3.2 billion debt to the European Central Bank. Mr. Tsipras is counting on the bailout being approved by all parties by that day, so that Athens can make the payment.
In a stormy parliamentary debate that began at 2 a.m. and lasted until 9:30 a.m. on Friday, Mr. Tsipras eventually took the floor and defended his decision to press for the loan agreement.
But in making that case, the prime minister once again seemed to contradict the position he had taken just last month, when he exhorted the nation before a referendum to reject the sort of austerity terms that the new deal demands of Greece and its people.
The bailout deal, which has severely undermined Mr. Tsipras’s base in Parliament, was “a necessary choice” to avoid returning to the drachma, the currency before Greece joined the eurozone, which would have been the equivalent of “committing suicide,” the prime minister told lawmakers during the all-night debate.
“I do not regret choosing compromise,” he said, adding that accepting the bailout would allow Greece to eventually emerge from recession and “start returning to growth” by 2018.
Now that the loan agreement has passed in the Greek Parliament, legislatures in Germany and other countries must also approve the bailout deal before Thursday for Greece to be able to meet repayments due that day.
The plan has stoked opposition in Germany over concerns about whether Greece will ever be able to repay what it owes or carry out the changes it is promising. But the German government has increasingly shown signs of softening its resistance.
Eurozone finance ministers who are scheduled to meet on Friday will have to decide whether to approve the bailout program or instead push for a bridge loan for a smaller amount — enough to let Greece avoid defaulting next week and to buy time for the German government to feel comfortable about recommending that its Parliament approve the bailout.
During the debate early Friday, Mr. Tsipras urged Greece’s creditors not to move ahead with the bridge-loan alternative, saying it would mean “a return to a crisis without end.”
He also obliquely accused Germany and its allies of trying to derail the €86 billion package, suggesting that at the Brussels meeting on Friday, they would “try to take back what has been agreed.”
In a sign of the mounting political turmoil that Mr. Tsipras faces, Zoe Konstantopoulou, a Syriza hard-liner and the speaker of Parliament, had resisted Mr. Tsipras’s entreaties to speed up a vote on the bill so that it could be completed before the finance ministers’ meeting in Brussels. Ms. Konstantopoulou sought to stall the vote with a series of grinding parliamentary procedures, which did not block the eventual outcome but did mean that lawmakers had to stay up all night.
And before the vote, the former energy minister, Panagiotis Lafazanis, who heads Syriza’s radical Left Platform, took the first step toward breaking away. In a statement signed by a dozen other leftist lawmakers, he said that his group would form a new anti-bailout movement, one opposed to the memorandum specifying the details of the new loan program.
“The struggle against the new memorandum starts now,” Mr. Lafazanis said, “by mobilizing people in every corner of the country.”