by Our Foreign Desk

GREEK Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras defeated a bid by the left of his party yesterday to end bailout talks and return to the drachma.

The vote by the Syriza party’s central committee came hours before high-level meetings with the country’s creditors in Athens.

In a marathon 12-hour session, the party’s central committee backed Mr Tsipras’s proposal to hold an emergency party conference in September, after the talks have been concluded.

The left had pushed for an earlier conference, pressing the government to abandon the negotiations.

“We have to agree that we can’t go on this way,” Mr Tsipras told the committee, adding that “the absurdity of this strange and unprecedented dualism” within the party must stop.

Recently sacked energy minister Panagiotis Lafazanis said: “This country no longer has democracy, but a peculiar type of totalitarianism — a dictatorship of the euro.”

The third bailout will include a punishing new round of austerity measures heaped on a country already in the throes of a six-year recession and with more than 25 per cent unemployment.

Mr Tsipras has pledged to back the new cutbacks, while openly admitting that he disagrees with them.

“We will implement them, yes, because we are forced to,” he told parliament yesterday. “But at the same time we will struggle to change them, to improve them and to counter their negative consequences.”

The prime minister also defended his former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis over revelations of a contingency plan to abandon the euro, saying that he had ordered the minister to make such preparations.