European leaders cancelled a summit meeting that was to be held Sunday to either discuss a deal to save Greece’s spot in the EU or to push it out of the union.
Sunday was to be the final, final, final last deadline for Greece to either submit an acceptable proposal for a bail-out or to be cast-off from the European union. It appears that deadline is not really all that final, but the way forward for Greece is still a bit fuzzy.
Finland’s Prime Minister Juha Sipila explained that Greece didn’t come with enough of a plan: “proposals made by the Greek government on reforms it plans to undertake in return for a third bailout are not adequate as a starting point for negotiations with international creditors.”
Italian Finance Minister Pier Padoan said that trust was the main obstacle to getting a deal done and that he “would like to see the Greek government to take concrete actions tomorrow in parliament to implement measures that are needed for Greece in the first place and then to rebuild trust and therefore allow concrete negotiations to move forward.”
Most likely, Greece will be required to get a preliminary set of austerity measures passed in its own parliament to show good faith to the EU ministers. That will trigger the next phase of bail-out talks where assistance to Greek’s liquidity-starved banks will be discussed.
Because Greece has failed to do much of anything to restructure its failed fiscal policies, EU leaders require more than promises to move forward. This puts Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras in the uncomfortable spot of begging his own anti-austerity party to pass austerity legislation despite a popular referendum vote that said the people didn’t want austerity either.
If Tsipras can’t get something through Greek parliament early in the week, Greece’s exit from the Euro may be quickly coming.
