GERMANY’S Parliament overwhelmingly approved the four-month extension of Greece’s bailout yesterday.

MPs voted 542-32 to back the bailout extension, with 13 abstentions.

Greece was granted the extension by its European creditors in exchange for budget reforms.

“This is not about new billions for Greece, not about changing this programme,” Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble told Parliament before the vote. “It’s about providing additional time to complete this programme successfully.”

Mr Schaeuble claimed that the eurozone was on the right track. “We must stick to this course and we must say to our colleagues in Greece that, with all respect for voters’ decision, Greece alone cannot decide in Europe what the right path is.”

But elsewhere, Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis called the EU deal a “fig leaf,” vaguely worded “deliberately” to secure approval by European parliaments.

“We are proud of the level of vagueness” in the agreement signed with eurozone finance ministers this week, he said, claiming this was “deliberately done” at the suggestion of Greece’s EU creditors “otherwise it would not be approved by their parliaments.”

“The deal was a fig leaf to conclude the eurogroup and dispense with the fiscal agreement,” Mr Varoufakis claimed.

But the finance minister’s claims didn’t carry much weight with Greece’s left.

Ultra-left protesters clashed with riot police in Greece on Thursday night in the first display of anti-government sentiment since Syriza took power a month ago.

Around 500 people took to the streets of Athens to demonstrate against the conduct of negotiations by the coalition government of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras.

And, more significantly, the Greek Communist Party (KKE) organised a mass protest outside the Greek Parliament yesterday and tabled a draft law to cancel the “anti-people agreements with lenders and all the anti-people laws and loans agreements passed by the previous governments.”

The party noted wryly that when this draft law was tabled by the KKE before the recent elections Syriza had supported it but had now come to a new agreement with the lenders and has “undertaken new anti-people commitments in relation to them.”