Naftemporiki — Alexis Tsipras twarned the lenders on Tuesday that his coalition government won’t implement a new round of austerity measures if debt relief isn’t extended to the country.
“We’ll vote for the measures in order to get a solution for the debt,” he told a news anchor on the Athens television station Ant1 on Tuesday.
His government earlier this month bowed to creditors’ demands and agreed, in principle, to implement more pension cuts in 2019 and to lower the tax-free annual income threshold in 2020 — two painful and wide-ranging measures mostly demanded by the IMF in order to ensure that ambitious fiscal targets after 2018 – mostly demanded by European creditors – are met.
Tsipras said his government faced demands for austerity measures that were 42 times greater than ultimately necessary. He qualified this statement by pointing to IMF forecasts in juxtaposition with the actual primary budget surplus for 2016, which preliminary figures say exceeds 4.0 percent of GDP.
Despite raging opposition and media criticism of a “tax tsunami” of direct and indirect tax hikes implemented in 2016, including higher VAT rates and increases on practically every good and service in the country, Tsipras maintained that “tax rates are the same, only marginally higher than they were before.”
In the same TV programme Mr Tsipras denied that his coalition government is to blame for a more than year-long delay in concluding the second review of the Greek bailout. Tsipras said it was the creditors fault. He also said that losses in negotiations are offset by countervailing measures his government hopes to take after 2018.
