On a one-way street

The only hope for Greece to achieve lower primary surplus targets is for it to convince the international community that it has changed its stance on investments and that all of the major reforms it has signed up to will be fully and properly implemented.

However, the present government has so far failed entirely on both these fronts.

All signs right now point to there being some kind of arrangement for the country’s massive debt pile that has nothing to do with the write-off the government had promised back when it was waging its “anti-memorandum” war.

Pensions, meanwhile, will be slashed even further as per the painful commitments the leftist-led administration made after the fiasco of negotiations with creditors in its first six months of power at the start of 2015.

Greece needs to break out of this vicious cycle or risk being stuck in it for years to come, but it doesn’t look like the solution will come from political developments alone.