A final denouement in the Greek crisis is closer and it looks like there will be no Grexit. Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel won’t go ahead with her threat to exorcise Greece from the Eurozone and is still open to working out a deal with Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras that would help his government stay afloat and not be expelled from euro membership.
At a last ditch effort, Athens managed to submit a new set of proposals to the European Council by the midnight deadline on Thursday. The new debt recovery plan had been approved by Tsipras’s cabinet in Athens late in the day and was then submitted to the Eurogroup and Greece’s creditors, the International Monetary Fund, European Commission and European Central Bank.
EU Meets Sunday
The EU has will meet on Sunday, July 12th to accept or reject the provisions. It had called for both sides to come up with additional compromises that would work to ensure that negotiations do not fail once again.
The full proposal has not been made public but it includes 12 to 13 billion euro of measures, including tax increases and pension reforms, the most pressing issues in the Greek crisis and those that have held the country captive for the last few months. Tsipras’s leftist government has until now been against any austerity measures but the package had to be approved by his party before it could be submitted to the Eurozone group.
Should the EU accept the proposals when it meets on Sunday, a Greek tragedy will have been averted.