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GREEK government ministers struggled last night to put together a list of initiatives to persuade debt inspectors from the EU-IMF-European Central Bank troika that they should recommend acceptance of their approach.
The Syriza-led coalition government agreed with its creditors on Friday that it would go cap in hand to lenders to secure a four-month extension to its so-called rescue loans.
The reforms are to be reviewed at a Brussels meeting of senior officials from creditor institutions this morning.
Greece will have some say in deciding what the measures to engender confidence among the finance community are, but overall they will still need approval from the troika.
Both Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis have had to give assurances that they will be guided by the EU and global financial agencies.
Their constant giving of ground while continuing to talk up their aspirations is already causing dissent within Syriza over claims it is backtracking on its promise to ease budget cuts for the recession-battered Greeks.
Mr Varoufakis hopes that his undertaking to get a grip on tax evasion and to “streamline” the civil service will persuade the EU in particular to ease its pressure on Athens.
However, this is dubious given the political and personal differences that have been evident between Mr Varoufakis and his German counterpart Wolfgang Schaeuble who has wasted no opportunity to read the riot act to his Greek “partner.”
Manolis Glezo, a 92-year-old Syriza MEP, who enthused the Greek nation when, as a young communist, he tore down the swastika flag from the Acropolis, apologised to people at the weekend for fostering an “illusion.”
He reminded his party leaders on the website of the Movement for Active Citizens, which he founded, that the electorate had voted “to remove the austerity that is not only the strategy of oligarchic Germany and the other EU countries but also that of the Greek oligarchy.”
Mr Glezos warned that by renaming the troika as “institutions,” the Memorandum of Understanding as “an agreement” and lenders into “partners,” this did not achieve, as the Greek proverb about Lent has it, the transformation of meat into fish.
