Greece seeks two-year austerity extension

[alp227]

Source: Financial Times

Greece is seeking a two-year extension of its latest austerity programme aimed at improving the country’s debt sustainability and prospects for a return to growth, according to a document obtained by the Financial Times.

Antonis Samaras, the centre-right prime minister, is expected to outline the proposal during talks next week with Angela Merkel, German chancellor, in Berlin and French President François Hollande in Paris.

nçois Hollande in Paris. It comes as Greece struggles to find another €11.5bn of spending cuts –equivalent to about 5 per cent of national output –to be implemented in 2013 and 2014 under the current bailout deal with the European Union and International Monetary Fund.


Read more: http://liveweb.archive.org/http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/979cd2f4-e635-11e1-ac5f-00144feab49a.html

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[stockholmer]

1. Greece: Syriza shines a light

http://www.redpepper.org.uk/greece-syriza-shines-a-light/

Like a swan moving moving forward with relaxed confidence while paddling furiously beneath the surface, Syriza, the radical left coalition that could become the next government of Greece, is facing enormous challenges calmly but with intensified activity.

In the palatial setting of the Greek parliament, Alexis Tsipras, the president of the radical left coalition Syriza’s parliamentary group, opens the first meeting of its 71 new deputies with his characteristic mix of cool and conviviality. At the same time, across Greece, other Syriza activists are organising neighbourhood assemblies, maintaining ‘solidarity kitchens’ and bazaars, working in medical social centres, protecting immigrants against attacks from Golden Dawn, the new fascist party that won 7 per cent of votes in the election, creating new Syriza currents at the base of the trade unions – and kickstarting the transition from a coalition of 12 political organisations (and 1.6 million voters) to a new kind of political party.

In the midst of all this they still find time to cook, dance, debate and organise at a three-day anti-racist festival. This annual festival, now in its 16th year, was founded with 40 organisations to ‘intercept’, in the words of Nicos Giannopolous, one of its driving forces, ‘the growth of nationalism and racism in the early nineties’. In its aims, principles of organisation and the plural culture that it promotes, it symbolises the strength of the internationalist civil society that Syriza has both helped to build and of which it is in good part a product. Now more than 250 organisations and parties are involved in organising the event and more than 30,000 people of every age and ethnic origin pour into the still-public space of Goudi Park in Athens.

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SYRIZA (Greece), Die Linke (Germany), Parti de Gauche (France), Miljöpartiet de Gröna (Sweden), Hreyfingin (Iceland) are the new faces of the left in the EU. These are the models that the Democrats on the USA should aspire to, not the corrupt/corporate/empiric/oligarch-approved paradigm that so rules the nation now.