Greek crisis: crunch time
The country will divide: right versus left – as it has been divided since British tanks rolled into Syntagma Square in 1944 to install former Nazi collaborators into office.
The country will divide: right versus left – as it has been divided since British tanks rolled into Syntagma Square in 1944 to install former Nazi collaborators into office.
Zoi Konstantopoulou, Syriza MP and speaker of the Greek parliament, tells Channel 4 News her government is trying to serve its democratic mandate and not trying to blackmail Europe.
With negotiations between Greece and its lenders stalled, but the differences amounting to around 0.6 per cent of Greek GDP, the stage is set for either a last-minute deal or a breakdown.
The Greek crisis ramped up a gear last night when, at the start of supposed “last chance” talks in Brussels, EU negotiators told the Greek delegation that “negotiations were over”.
Why did Greece collapse and Ireland survive? First, because the Irish crisis was a banking crisis. And in Greece you can’t impose austerity and hope modernise at the same time.
While Tsipras, Varoufakis and their negotiators have been trying to get the country’s debt reduced via the IMF and ECB, Zoe Konstantopoulou has been working to get it declared invalid.
They came, they saw, they had – as one Syriza MP put it to me last night – “their balls handed to them”. For all the smiling and calm displayed by Alexis Tsipras, the Greeks know they came off the worst.
The break-up of the Eurozone will lead to the sort of “nationalisms” seen in the run up to the Second World War, Greece’s top negotiator Euclid Tsakalotos tells Channel 4 News.
There may be a technical get-out clause that allows Greece to wrap its four repayment dates to the IMF this month into one, but the IMF’s own assessment is correct: Greece can’t pay.
Running short of cash to pay public sector salaries, pensions and debt obligations, Greece’s Syriza has laid out what it will and will not negotiate with its creditors, but will it be enough?
The surge in support for the radical left Podemos party in Spain’s regional elections is the latest manifestation of a spectre haunting Europe: the rise of the anti-austerity movement.
Both in Spain and Poland, centrist pro-EU politics is falling victim to its association with a crony-ist elite and its failure to tell a convincing story to the young.
European officials trying to secure a last-minute deal in the debt stand-off between Greece and the IMF now have to anticipate the threat of revolt within the country’s ruling Syriza party.
After a weekend of leak and counter-leak, today has seen another dramatic development: the leak to a newspaper of the European Commission’s proposal to break the Greece logjam.
The parents of two children killed by carbon monoxide poisoning on holiday in Corfu accuse Thomas Cook of not apologising despite an inquest’s concluding the travel firm “breached its duty of care.”