After 16 hours of negotiations, Greece and the rest of the Eurogroup this morning reached a deal on a new bailout.
“There will not be a Grexit,” Jean-Claude Juncker, the head of the European Commission, reassured reporters. What there will be instead is €82-6bn worth of new funding, while €50bn of state assets will be privatised, with €37.5bn going to Greece’s creditors and €12.5bn going to growth initiatives. Greece will have to reform its VAT arrangements and pensions, and sign up to immediate spending cuts if it breaches its targets.
The deal will be voted on by the Greek parliament by Wednesday and then ratified by the national parliaments of several other Eurozone nations.
The tough terms of the deal mean it will be controversial, with some questioning why Greek leader Alexis Tsipras accepted stringent conditions on new lending after winning a referendum on the bailout last week. Commentators have compared the harshness with the Treaty of Versailles, and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman said the terms strayed into “pure vindictiveness”.
Germany’s Angela Merkel, asked about the Versailles comparison, said that she never made “historical analogies, ” while Jean-Claude Juncker said: “I don’t think that the Greek people have been humiliated and I don’t think the other Europeans were losing their face. It’s a typical European arrangement.”
Exclusive: “We were set up”. Read the NS interview with former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis here.
Content from our partners
Related
