Update, 12:00 p.m.: Greece did not present new written plans at Tuesday’s emergency summit to try to pay back its creditors and save itself from being forced out of the eurozone, according to the eurozone’s top finance minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem. As banks begin to run out of money in the country, and as a wary Europe gets increasingly restless, the lack of an effective new proposal from Greece is a major setback to efforts to save the country from facing disaster and being forced out of the common currency.
A new proposal from the Greek government was widely anticipated by finance ministers Tuesday, especially after Greek voters rejected Europe’s last bailout proposal in a referendum on Sunday. But it didn’t come—and instead, a Greek proposal is now expected to land tomorrow morning, when finance ministers will gather once more.
Original post: With negotiators arriving in Brussels for an emergency summit on the Greek financial crisis, a German newspaper reported Tuesday that Greece’s renewed proposal to its credtors would contain similar terms to the referendum rejected by a 20-point margin by the country’s voters.
The report in Germany’s Sueddeutsche Zeitung, relayed by Reuters, is one of the few hints to Greece’s plan going into the meeting of European finance ministers. The president of the European Council’s Eurogroup, Jeroen Dijsselbloem of the Netherlands, said outside the meeting he hadn’t been told what was in the new Greek proposal but that negotiations would be complicated by Sunday’s referendum, according to the Guardian:
“The No [vote] means the old proposals were rejected. It is very difficult. We await the new proposals and see if they are credible.”
Asked if they had not already been delivered and were a version of the previous reforms, he said, “You seem to have them. I am going in to see my colleagues. We have been doing whatever it takes to strengthen the eurozone and keep it together.”
Asked about Monday’s resignation of Greece’s anti-austerity finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, Dijsselbloem downplayed the importance of personalities, saying the negotiations were about “where we stand politically.” Varoufakis said that his departure was an attempt to appease some partners in the talks, and reporters on hand in Brussels noted a stark contrast between Varoufakis’s blustering confidence and the reserved manner of his self-described “nervous and anxious” replacement, Euclid Tsakalotos:
Tuesday’s meeting was described by Belgium’s finance minister as “all about the Greek proposals,” so the day’s news out of Brussels is likely to revolve around what those proposals outline and how they’re received.
