Germany backs Greece bailout talks
BERLIN — German lawmakers on Friday approved entering into detailed negotiations for a Greek bailout amid a simmering international debate over providing more debt relief to Athens and intensifying questions about whether Greece would be better off leaving the European common currency.
With resistance to providing more help to Greece growing among conservatives, 439 lawmakers voted in favor of moving ahead with the bailout deal European leaders negotiated last weekend in Brussels. There were 119 votes against, and 40 legislators abstained.
Chancellor Angela Merkel and her finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, had urged Parliament to back the bailout, which both called “a last attempt” to order Greece’s finances and build a functioning state. It would be Greece’s third bailout in five years, and it was negotiated with the goal of keeping the country in the Eurozone.
But a breakdown of the vote showed that 60 members of Ms. Merkel’s conservative bloc voted against starting talks on a new package, that five abstained and that four did not vote. The size of that opposition was double the size in February, when Parliament had last voted on Greek debt relief. At the time, 29 deputies opposed the measure, and three abstained.
The chancellor, who turned 61 on Friday, used her statement to review the past six months, in which Greece’s situation deteriorated rapidly. By the time European leaders gathered last weekend in Brussels for a marathon session that ended with an agreement to demand strict conditions of Greece before providing it with new aid, it was not just Greece’s fate at stake, she said.
“The alternative to this agreement would not have been an orderly exit from the euro, one that Greece wanted and was drawn up by everybody, but predictable chaos,” Ms. Merkel said.
Separately on Friday, the European Union agreed to provide Athens with a shortterm loan of 7.16 billion euros, or about $7.8 billion, to prevent it from defaulting on earlier loans that it is to repay by Monday.
Another default, including € 4.25 billion owed to the European Central Bank, would have dashed Greece’s hope of reopening its banks, which have been closed since June 29, and of restoring some stability to its crumbling finances.
Greece also won tentative support on Friday from the European Stability Mechanism, the eurozone rescue fund in Luxembourg that is expected to issue new loans to Greece as part of a long-term program. The group said in a statement on Friday that its governors had endorsed a new program in principle and that aid would be contingent on a final agreement between Greece and its eurozone creditors.