Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras appealed to his party’s lawmakers on Friday to back a tough reforms package after abruptly offering last-minute concessions to try to save the country from financial meltdown.
After walking into a party meeting to applause, Tsipras rallied his Syriza lawmakers to throw their weight behind the new proposals ahead of a snap vote in parliament on the negotiations, urging them to help keep Greece in the euro.
“We are confronted with crucial decisions,” a government official quoted Tspiras telling his Syriza lawmakers.
“We got a mandate to bring a better deal than the ultimatum that the Eurogroup gave us, but certainly not given a mandate to take Greece out of the eurozone,” he said. “We are all in this together.”
It is unclear whether all the creditors would back the latest reforms package, which was strikingly similar to the terms Greece had rejected in a referendum Tsipras had called in June. Germany sounded wary, with a finance ministry spokesman ruling out any debt reduction that would lower its real value.
But France, Greece’s strongest supporter in the euro zone, rushed to offer praise with President Francois Hollande calling the offer “serious and credible”. Eurogroup head Jeroen Dijsselbloem called it a “thorough piece of text” but declined to go into specifics.
