Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras repeated on Tuesday, this time from Strasbourg, that his poll-trailing government will avoid implementing social security spending cuts on Jan. 1, 2018, as long as the Greek state achieves agreed-to fiscal targets.
“We can avoid a measure that is unnecessary, anti-developmental and not structural (in nature),” he told Euronews on Tuesday.
In a bid to frame a possible postponement or even suspension of the measure, which his coalition government agreed to with creditors in 2016 and subsequently passed through Parliament, Tsipras said that “…maybe the most significant thing that’s changed (in Greece, over the memorandum era), is that Greece, certainly, is obliged to reach targets that have been agreed to, but (Greek) governments, each time, will be the ones to decide the means and policies through which the targets are achieved.”
Avoiding another round of pension cuts, even for one-third of all pensioners in the country, has risen to the top of the government’s agenda after the official conclusion of the third bailout on Aug. 20, as a general election looms on the horizon for 2019.
