By D. Hatzinikolas
Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras will be on a tour of the large island of Crete on Tuesday when the EWG is set to offer an opinion on his abrupt announcement of a one-off 617-million-euro “holiday bonus” for pensioners – unveiled last week over the state-run broadcaster’s airwaves no less.
The EuroWorking Group has been tasked, as the Eurogroup’s experts’ council, with deciding on whether the measure negatively affects the current Greek program (third bailout).
Back in Athens, sources close to the leftist government are optimistic that the EWG will call for the implementation of short-term debt relief measures decided for Greece at the Dec. 5 Eurogroup meeting. Those measures were frozen pending a decision on the bonus for 1.6 million pensioners receiving under 850 euros a month – regardless of their property and assets.
The latest deadline for closing a second review of the Greek program is now the end of January 2017, a necessary condition for a re-inclusion of Greek bonds in the ECB’s QE program – another element in the Tsipras government’s “best-case” scenario.
Conversely, the government, both officially and unofficially, has repeatedly dismissed the possibility of snap elections, and even the latest reports claiming another referendum. The recurrent speculation over another return to the ballot boxes comes as the Tsipras government’s popularity has plummeted, at least as far as opinion poll results are concerned.
Meanwhile, in a direct intervention on the specific issue the day, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble emphasized that “if we don’t follow the rules, the Eurozone will collapse”, he said when queried over the decision to grant the bonus to more than half of Greece’s pensioners.
