ATHENS: Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras on Friday said the country was “turning a page” after eurozone ministers declared its crisis over as they granted Athens debt relief under a bailout exit strategy.
The eurozone ministers’ agreement comes nearly a decade after Athens finances spun out of control, sparking three bailouts and threatening the country’s euro membership.
“Yesterday we reached a historic agreement on Greece’s debt with the Eurogroup,” Tsipras told the country’s president, Prokopis Pavlopoulos.
“We are turning a page,” he said, adding that Greece had to remain on the path of reform.
Following the eurozone ministers’ hard-fought agreement declared earlier Friday, Greece is slated to leave its third financial rescue since 2010 on August 20.
“The Greek crisis ends here tonight,” said EU Economic Affairs Commissioner Pierre Moscovici, after marathon talks in Luxembourg.
The deal was expected to be an easy one, but last-minute resistance by Germany — Greece’s long bailout nemesis and biggest creditor — dragged the talks on for six hours.
The ministers agreed to extend maturities by 10 years on major parts of its total debt obligations, a mountain that has reached close to double the country’s annual economic output.
They also agreed to disburse €15 billion ($17.5 billion) to ease Greece’s exit from the rescue program.
This would leave Greece with a hefty €24 billion safety cushion, officials said.
“The agreed debt relief is bigger than we had expected,” Citi European Economics said in a note.
“In particular, the 10-year extension of the EFSF loans’ maturity and most importantly the grace period on interest payments is a significant development,” they added.
“The Greek government is happy with the agreement,” Greek Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos said after the talks.
But “to make this worthwhile we have to make sure that the Greek people must quickly see concrete results... they need to feel the change in their own pockets,” he added.
The eight-year crisis toppled four governments and shrank the economy by 25 percent. Unemployment soared and still hovers over 20 percent, sending thousands of young educated Greeks abroad.
Optimism is tempered by Greece’s remaining fiscal obligations, which will demand serious discipline, observers say.
“This is a very tight program. A surplus of 3.5 percent to 2022 and 2.2 percent (on average) to 2060 is not easy at all,” Kostas Boukas, asset management director at Beta Securities, told Athens 9,84 radio.
“We’ll have to see if the pledges will be kept, especially as they depend on international developments as well,” he said.
Under pressure from its creditors, Greece has already agreed to slash pensions again in 2019, and reduce the tax-free income threshold for millions of people in 2020.
Further cuts will be made to maintain the 3.5-percent surplus, if necessary.
“It would be a terrible mistake to cultivate illusions that the end of the bailout means a return to normality,” said pro-opposition daily Ta Nea.
“What follows is tough oversight which no other country has experienced in a post-bailout period,” the daily said.
The European Commission has already specified that Greece will remain under fiscal supervision until it repays 75 percent of its loans.
Athens has received €273.7 billion in assistance since 2010, enabling it to avoid punishing borrowing rates on debt markets.
The International Monetary Fund, led by the tough-talking Christine Lagarde, welcomed the debt relief, but cited reservations about Greece’s obligations over the long term.
“In the medium term analysis there is no doubt in our minds that Greece will be able to reaccess the markets,” Lagarde said after the talks.
“As far as the longer term is concerned we have concerns,” she added.
The reform-pushing IMF played an active role in the two first Greek bailouts, but took only an observer role in the third in the belief that Greece’s debt pile was unsustainable in the long term.
Greece ‘turning a page’ as eurozone declares crisis over
Greece ‘turning a page’ as eurozone declares crisis over
- The eurozone ministers’ agreement comes nearly a decade after Athens finances spun out of control, sparking three bailouts and threatening the country’s euro membership.
- EU Economic Affairs Commissioner Pierre Moscovici: “The Greek crisis ends here tonight.”
Trump takes unconventional approach to communicating to the public about war in Iran
- The communications strategy opened Trump to criticism that he hadn’t done enough to explain the rationale and objectives of the war
Typical of an unconventional presidency, the Trump administration waited more than 48 hours to make any live, public communication to the American people about why it had decided to go to war with Iran.
President Donald Trump discussed why he launched the attack prior to a White House ceremony honoring military heroes on Monday but took no questions from reporters. Earlier in the day, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Dan Caine briefed journalists at the Pentagon.
The two days previous, Trump delivered two pretaped statements that were released on Truth Social, the social media site owned by the president’s media company, and granted telephone interviews to more than a dozen journalists — several of which produced fragmented responses that, to some, clouded as much as they cleared up.
The communications strategy opened Trump to criticism that he hadn’t done enough to explain the rationale and objectives of the war, even as the American military suffered its first casualties. By contrast, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has teamed with the US against Iran, delivered two statements the day the war began and addressed reporters Monday at the site of a missile attack that killed nine people. The Israeli military has held multiple press briefings each day.
“The American people need a commander in chief, and he has been absent in that role,” Rahm Emanuel, White House chief of staff under President Barack Obama, said on CNN Monday. Emanuel, a Democrat, is contemplating a run for the presidency in 2028.
An unconventional strategy leads to criticism
Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, wrote on social media that “after Trump launched a new war on Iran, he did not rush back to the White House to make an Oval Office address to rally the nation as other presidents have done. He stayed at Mar-a-Lago to attend a glitzy political fundraiser.”
That post provoked a response from Steven Cheung, White House communications director. “Imagine being a reporter so consumed with Trump Derangement Syndrome that he wants President Trump to mimic the failed policies of the past. The truth is that President Trump spent the majority of his time monitoring the situation in a secure facility, in constant contact with world leaders, and made multiple addresses to the nation that garnered hundreds of millions of views. He also took dozens of calls with reporters.”
The calls included one with Baker’s colleague at The Times, Zolan Kanno-Youngs. Trump’s mobile phone number is known to many of the reporters who cover him, and the president often takes their calls for on-the-spot interviews. Besides The Times, he spoke in the aftermath of the attack to journalists for ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, CNBC, Fox News Channel, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Axios, Politico and an Israeli television station.
Most of the calls were brief and marginally illuminating; Politico’s Dasha Burns said Trump answered but said he was too busy to talk. The public couldn’t hear what Trump said in the interviews and was dependent upon what the journalists chose to report on the conversations.
“I spoke to President Trump today and he told me that the operation in Iran is going to go very fast,” Libby Alon, a reporter for Channel 14 News in Israel, wrote about her interview on X. “It’s doing very well, and (will) make the people of Israel very happy, and the people of the world very happy.”
The Times reported that in its six-minute chat, Trump “offered several seemingly contradictory visions of how power might be transferred to a new government — or even whether the existing Iranian power structure would run that government or be overthrown.”
In one of his two conversations with Trump, ABC News’ Jonathan Karl said when he asked about the death of Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the president said: “I got him before he got me. They tried twice. Well I got him first.” CNN’s Jake Tapper went on the air minutes after his conversation Monday, saying Trump told him “the big one is coming soon,” an apparent reference to a future attack.
Asked for comment, White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said: “President Trump is the most transparent and accessible president in American history. The American people have never had a more direct and authentic relationship with a president of the United States than they have with President Trump.”
Hegseth briefing concentrates on friendly reporters
Pentagon reporters learned late Sunday about Hegseth’s briefing. Reporters from The Associated Press, Reuters, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News Channel and Stars & Stripes were permitted into the briefing room, but Hegseth did not call on them. Instead, he took questions from NewsNation and Trump-friendly outlets like the Daily Caller, Daily Wire, One America News and the Christian Broadcasting Network. Most mainstream news outlets left their regular stations at the Pentagon last fall rather than agree to Hegseth’s rules restricting their work.
Hegseth denounced the “foolishness” of people wanting to know details of the operation in advance, such as whether Americans would commit to more than air power, and said the operation would continue as long as it took to achieve objections. He initially ignored NBC News’ Courtney Kube when she called out a question: “President Trump put a four-week time limit on it. Are you saying he’s wrong?”
Later, Hegseth denounced Kube for asking “the typical NBC sort of gotcha-type question. President Trump has all the latitude in the world to talk about how long it might take — four weeks, two weeks, six weeks, it could move up, it could move back. We’re going to execute at his command the objectives he set out to achieve.”
Unlike Pentagon briefings in past administrations, reporters were given assigned seats, with the Trump-friendly outlets seated in front. Jennifer Griffin, Hegseth’s former colleague at Fox News Channel who left the Pentagon with other reporters after not accepting his new rules, was seated in the last row.
