by Our Foreign Desk

GREEK Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras faced the hard task yesterday of selling the terms of the EU bailout deal to his party and nation.

Parliament must pass a new raft of draconian austerity laws to comply with the demands of the troika of international creditors — the European Union, the European Central Bank and the Internal Monetary Fund.

These include opening up sectors of the economy to privatisation, including energy and ferry transport, while more goods and services will be taxed.

“We managed to avoid the most extreme measures,” said Mr Tsipras, claiming that the deal was better than that rejected by a referendum a week ago.

He has rejected a demand by some creditors to transfer Greek assets abroad as a form of collateral and to prevent the collapse of the banking sector.

But workers face attacks on their rights to collective bargaining, industrial action and protection from collective dismissal and cuts to pensions.

And in a clear attack on democracy, laws must be passed that would trigger “quasi-automatic spending cuts” if the government misses its budget surplus targets.

The government must also consult the troika on all relevant draft legislation before submitting it to public consultation or to parliament.

If it meets these requirements, Greece will get a three-year “rescue” programme and a commitment to restructure its debt, which is unsustainably high at around €320 billion — approximately 180 per cent of annual GDP.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokesman rejected suggestions that Berlin had sought to humiliate Greece.

But Mr Tsipras has faced immediate resistance to the deal from within his own Syriza party.

The Left Platform swiftly denounced the agreement as the “worst deal possible … that maintains the country’s status — a debt colony under a German-run European Union.”

Communist trade union front Pame will stage rallies and pickets against the new measures on Wednesday evening.

And the small ultra-left Antarsya party also called a demonstration outside the Athens parliament last night.

Labour Minister Panos Skourletis said another general election was on the cards before the end of the year since the government will need “borrowed votes” from the opposition.

“I cannot see how we can avoid elections in 2015,” he said. “It’s unnatural — we believe in something different than what we’ve been forced to sign with a gun pointed to our head.”