Foreign leaders weigh in on deal
As government officials finalized a bill containing the details of a new, tough agreement with creditors ahead of a crucial vote in Parliament Wednesday, a series of foreign leaders weighed in Tuesday, some expressing support for the deal, others conveying skepticism.
A White House statement said President Barack Obama considered the agreement “a positive step that could help to underpin a return to growth and debt stability in Greece” but noted that “further work will be required.”
The statement followed phone conversations between Obama and French President Francois Hollande, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, British Prime Minister David Cameron and Federica Mogherini, the European Union’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy.
In an interview with France’s TV1, Hollande rejected claims that the new deal was a humiliation for Greece. “I cannot accept that people be humiliated,” he said. “Humiliation would have been to drive [Greece] out of the eurozone.”
The French leader said Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras had been “brave” to insist that a privatization fund, into which 50 billion euros in assets is to be transferred, be based in Greece, and not Luxembourg as creditors originally had proposed, and said he had fought Tsipras’s corner on this issue. Hollande added that his government would make proposals to reinforce Europe’s economic governance.
German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, for his part, was typically hawkish. Asked about the idea of a Greek exit from the eurozone, Schaeuble told reporters that “there are many people inside the German government… who believe that this would be, or could be the better solution for Greece and the people in Greece.” He added that a Grexit would of course require “that Greece takes that decision itself.”
As European Union finance ministers converged in Brussels to discuss bridge financing for Greece, Schaeuble said “it will be a challenge” to get Greece a quick loan it can use to avoid defaulting on a 3.5-billion-euro debt repayment to the European Central Bank, which is due on Monday.
Meanwhile, according to a report in Germany’s Handelsblatt, Schaeuble suggested the issuance of IOUs during a Eurogroup summit on Monday.
