P.M. says country needs more time to make spending cuts and reforms


BERLIN (AFP) ― Greece’s prime minister called Wednesday for more time to make spending cuts and reforms to unlock funds to keep the debt-wracked country afloat, two days before crunch talks in Germany.

“All that we want is a little ‘breathing space’ to revive the economy quickly and raise state income. More time does not automatically mean more money,” Antonis Samaras said in an interview with German daily Bild.

Samaras was to meet the head of the Eurogroup of eurozone finance ministers, Jean-Claude Juncker, on Wednesday ahead of a trip on Friday to Berlin to meet Chancellor Angela Merkel.

He holds talks with French President Francois Hollande on Saturday.

“Let me be very clear. We are not asking for additional money. We are sticking by our commitments and are meeting all our requirements,” Samaras told Bild, Europe’s most widely-read paper.

“We need to get out of this negative psychology, which is like a black hole. Greeks have voted for a new government to put the country on a new course,” the prime minister insisted.

“We are making progress in structural reforms and privatizations. And it is not fair when some people in Europe want to keep pushing us back into this hole,” he said in comments translated into German.

As part of a rescue package with its international creditors, Greece has committed to slashing some 11.5 billion euros ($14.2 billion) from spending over two years from 2013.

Samaras reportedly wants to discuss extending the deadline by two years in his talks in Berlin and Paris.

Berlin has insisted that there can be no wiggle room for Greece either in terms of the substance of the reforms and cuts it must make or in terms of the time it takes to achieve them.

A team of auditors from the European Commission, International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank is due to report next month on whether Greece has done enough to unlock a further tranche of aid to stave off bankruptcy.

Samaras warned of the consequences of an exit from the eurozone.

“It would mean at least five more years of recession and unemployment over 40 percent. A nightmare for Greece: economic collapse, social unrest and an unprecedented crisis of democracy,” he cautioned.

If Greece were to exit the 17-nation eurozone, the debt crisis that has lasted for nearly three years would escalate rapidly, Samaras predicted, “to say nothing of the dramatic consequences on the financial markets.”

“What society, what democracy could survive this? In the end it would be like the Weimar Republic,” he said, referring to a period of economic instability in Germany that eventually led to the rise of Adolf Hitler’s Nazis.

“A lot has gone wrong, in Greece and outside Greece. Now we are getting down to all the necessary reforms,” he pledged.