They did it to themselvesThese guys really seem fukked.
As did the rest of the EU for letting them in with no constraints
They will be OK though.
Greece financial crisis | Latest : Deal reached with even tougher conditions for Greece.
As did the rest of the EU for letting them in with no constraints
They will be OK though.
Futuristic Eskimo
All Star
IMF MD Lagarde publicly stating debt restructuring is needed
Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty
John R. Schindler
07.08.151:00 AM ET
Is Putin Playing Puppetmaster in Greece?
As the Greeks move further away from the European Union and NATO, the Kremlin is poised to reap the benefits—with rumors swirling that Putin is already calling the shots.
The weekend’s stunning repudiation of further European bailouts by a strong majority of Greeks shocked Brussels and beyond. That 61 percent of Greek voters want nothing to do with European Union “fixes” to their country’s grave fiscal crisis, which has preoccupied the EU for five years, represents a shocking development to Eurocrats.
What happens next is on everyone’s mind. Unless Athens comes up with a revised—and more plausible—finance plan very soon, expulsion from the Eurozone appears imminent. While that could cause financial instability for Europe, and may bring bad tidings far beyond, there’s one country that seems to be savoring this crisis.
That’s Russia. To the surprise of no one who pays attention to Vladimir Putin’s persistent efforts to undermine the EU and NATO, Moscow is poised to reap political benefits from Greece’s financial collapse.
The morning after the referendum, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras spokewith Putin to discuss the fallout—a full day before Tsipras spoke with President Obama.
Neither are close ties between Athens and Moscow anything new, or exactly hidden. Tsipras’s first foreign outreach upon becoming prime minister was to Moscow’s ambassador—not to EU or NATO partners.
The affection of Greece’s ruling Syriza party for much of the Putin worldview, including a reflexive anti-American and anti-NATO posture with strong doses of “anti-imperialist” rhetoric, isn’t something Athens has been shy about. Although Syriza’s far-left political orientation would seem to make it an unlikely partner for Putin’s conservative, even traditionalist, Kremlin, shared anti-Western values seem to be enough.
Syriza’s robust Moscow links exist at several levels and are nothing new. Ideological harmony has been matched by money deals behind the scenes. Long before taking power at the beginning of this year, party leaders had regular discussions with top Russian officials as well as with far-right activists like Alexander Dugin, a neo-fascist ideologue who intermittently has the Kremlin’s ear.
Unsurprisingly, given the extent of Greece’s financial-cum-political crisis, anti-EU and anti-American sentiments run deep, to a degree not found in any other NATO country. Mounting concerns that Athens is falling into Moscow’s orbit, its ostensible Western political and military ties notwithstanding, are no longer a fantasy.
“For Athens, NATO seems to be mostly a paper exercise at this point,” a senior Alliance official told me, expressing a common frustration at Alliance headquarters, where Greek representatives are viewed with mounting suspicion. Many in NATO fear that information shared with Greece, including intelligence, is winding up in Moscow. Recently the Alliance executed a long-overdue cull of Russian liaison officers in Brussels, many of whom were barely concealed spies, and now there’s fear that the Kremlin can make up that setback with Greek help.
It’s premature to suggest that Greece might actually leave NATO, much less the EU, since Athens gets considerable benefits from both partnerships, but it’s certainly time to ask where that country’s sympathies truly lie. More than a shared Orthodox faith, buttressed by hazy paeans to long-dead Byzantium, is at work now in the relationship between Athens and Moscow.
The involvement of Russian intelligence in present-day Greek turmoil plays an important role, albeit one seldom discussed openly. Greece has long been a playground for Kremlin spies. During the Cold War, KGB operatives worked in Greece with a degree of impunity they found in no other NATO country, while Soviet spies penetrated Greek politics and society very deeply.
Under Putin, such covert linkages have been reestablished, and secret Russian activities in Greece today enjoy a degree of openness they never had in Soviet times. Since Syriza came to power, the already significant contingent of Russian intelligence officers serving in Athens under official covers (usually as diplomats) has been bolstered, according to Western security officials. Friendly meetings between Greek officials and representatives of the SVR and GRU, Russian military intelligence, detected by NATO intelligence, have been a cause of discussion and concern in Brussels, Washington, and beyond.
It’s not like Syriza has been hiding all of this. Defense Minister Panos Kammenos, shortly after a visit to Moscow last fall, signed a memorandum of understanding between his Athens think tank, the Institute for Geopolitical Studies, and a Moscow counterpart, the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, known as RISI.
However, RISI is no ordinary think tank. Headed by Leonid Reshetnikov—a career KGB officer who retired as a lieutenant-general and the head of analysis for the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, or SVR—RISI is a Kremlin outfit, a sort of governmental NGO that functions as the public face of Putin’s vast intelligence apparatus. Officially RISI is no longer part of the SVR, falling under the presidential administration, but no Western intelligence services accept that claim at face value.
“It’s like the bad old days when we didn’t trust the Greeks and they didn’t trust us. Only now Putin’s in the middle of the game.”
Reshetnikov, a one-time communist but now a devout, indeed militant, Orthodox Christian, is close to Putin and is one of the top movers and shakers in the Kremlin when it comes to spy matters. Speaking Greek and Serbian, he plays a large role in Russian activities in the Balkans, which have increased noticeably in recent months. Reshetnikov’s regular trips to southeastern Europe, where he denounces Western “imperialism” and does photo ops with senior Orthodox clergy, feature in local media, usually with praise.
Prime Minister Tsipras, too, has visited RISI headquarters, leading to the odd situation that one of the top security partnerships possessed by a NATO and EU country is with Putin’s foreign intelligence service. Current government assessments coming out of Athens “read like they’re written by the SVR—which they probably are,” bemoaned a European intelligence official. “We’ve always had our doubts about the Greeks,” he added, “but today’s situation is even worse than it was during the Cold War. The Russians are quietly running the show.”
Rumors of Russian money and influence calling the shots in Athens—or at least playing an outsized role—are no secret in NATO security circles. That Putin wants to harm Greece’s already precarious links with the EU and NATO is plain to see, and it seems to be getting close to fruition as the Greek crisis worsens.
“They’re only technically on our side,” explained a retired CIA officer with long experience in Greek matters. U.S. intelligence has never fully trusted the Greeks, with the CIA especially having misgivings stemming from the 1975 murder of Richard Welch, the agency’s station chief in Athens. While Langley blamed Phil Agee, a former CIA officer who went over to the Cubans and Soviets—think of Agee as the Ed Snowden of the mid-1970s—for Welch’s death, it was long obvious that Athens was never very eager to catch Welch’s killers. Neither did the 1988 terrorist assassination of the U.S. naval attaché to Greece, Captain Bill Nordeen, promote trust.
Ties between U.S. intelligence and the Greek security services suffered for years, and things are getting unpleasant again. “We’re back to square one,” rued the former CIA case officer. “It’s like the bad old days when we didn’t trust the Greeks and they didn’t trust us. Only now Putin’s in the middle of the game.”
Time will tell if Moscow can pull a strategic win out of Greece’s mounting chaos. But there’s little doubt anymore that the Syriza government’s barely concealed ties with the Kremlin, particularly with its intelligence services, are causing serious heartburn inside NATO and the EU alike. It’s now Putin’s game to lose.
88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
Greece Says Banks to Remain Closed Through Monday
July 8, 2015 — 4:14 PM EDT
The Greek Finance Ministry says the country's banks will remain closed through July 13.
Story developing...
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...anks-to-remain-closed-through-monday-ibv7f4v9
safe to assume they won't ever open again
July 8, 2015 — 4:14 PM EDT
The Greek Finance Ministry says the country's banks will remain closed through July 13.
Story developing...
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...anks-to-remain-closed-through-monday-ibv7f4v9
safe to assume they won't ever open again
Thats like saying the universe is kind of bigI'd say Brazil, China, and Russia have their hand pretty full
I remember the hopeful days
Nigel Farage spits fire on the mic ...... lot of rapperesentatives in Europe are scrambling for comebacks after this barrage....this is like 50 Cent's "Piggy Bank"
King Kreole
natural blondie like goku
A slovenian using the N word?
this nikka Farage came with the heat on this joint Tsipras sitting back like
Far left and far right teaming up, these are surely wild days
Futuristic Eskimo
All Star
It is the small cost they have to pay for not having to go back to the deutschmark.
88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
A Lesson From Greece: Beware the Prophets of Boom
How optimism can trip up countries in debt
by Charles Kenny
July 8, 2015 — 10:16 AM EDT
Photographer: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg
In 2010, as Greece signed a bailout deal with the International Monetary Fund, forecasts by the IMF and the European Commission suggested the country’s debt-to-GDP ratio would peak below 150 percent of gross domestic product in 2012. The forecasts also projected that Greek GDP in 2015 would be 8 percent larger than in 2011. This optimistic vision of the future was based on underlying assumptions that Greece would go from having the lowest productivity growth in the euro zone to among the highest, alongside the highest labor force participation rates and employment rates equal to Germany’s.
No one—including the IMF—believes those assumptions anymore. The latest estimates suggest Greek GDP will be 10 percent smaller than in 2011. Why were those early prognostications so rosy? It turns out that the IMF, the EU, and other institutions have a tradition of consistently overoptimistic growth forecasts in times of crisis. Dealing with that tendency would significantly reduce the harm done by future financial crises.
Debt climbs when economies falter. Using a sample of developing countries, New York University economist Bill Easterly showed in a recent paper that the pace of growth has a strong association with debt levels. He suggested that developing economies that experienced accelerated growth between 1975 and 1994 saw debt-to-GDP ratios increase by 1 percent per annum. Countries that saw growth rates fall, on the other hand, saw debt-to-GDP climb far faster—between 3 percent per annum for those that saw modest slowdowns to 7 percent for those that saw the sharpest declines. In his analysis, he demonstrated how the same pattern applied to countries in the euro zone after the financial crisis.
At the same time, Easterly showed that countries in debt crises are prone to especially optimistic growth forecasts. Just as the IMF and the European Commission have for Greece, the World Bank and IMF drew up growth forecasts for these countries to predict debt sustainability. Easterly found that forecasts for highly indebted poor countries in the 1990s and early 2000s were consistently too positive in their estimates–overpredicting growth by an average of 1 percent a year. IMF researchers agree with him: Hans Gemberg and Andrew Martinez of the fund’s Independent Evaluation Office suggest the organization’s forecasts “tended to be consistently over-optimistic in times of country-specific, regional, and global recessions.”
Looking at European Commission forecasts of government expenditure as a percentage of GDP, António Afonso and Jorge Silva of the University of Lisbon find (PDF) that the commission similarly and systematically forecast lower government expenditure-to-GDP ratios than occurred. The commission’s forecasts for one year out were off by an average of 0.4 percent of GDP over the period 1999 to 2011—and around 84 percent of the error was due to overconfidence about GDP growth rates. The optimistic inaccuracy about the government’s fiscal situation fed into similarly overoptimistic government debt-to-GDP predictions. As with the IMF, the commission’s forecasts have been particularly distorted for Greece, Ireland, and Portugal—the crisis countries receiving IMF and European support.
It isn’t hard to figure out why it's tempting to forecast faster growth when debt levels are rising: It's a way to avoid painful choices. Easterly showed that the U.S. Office of Management and Budget cranked up growth forecasts after 2001 so that lower taxes combined with increased spending on defense and homeland security could look fiscally responsible.
For highly indebted poor countries and the World Bank, as much as for Greece and its creditors, strong growth forecasts make higher debt levels look sustainable. If the economy grows, so will government revenues. From the point of view of the debtor country, the bigger revenues grow, the less need to cut spending to allow for debt payments. From the point of view of creditors, the bigger revenues grow, the less need to forgive debt to make payments a sustainable burden.
In turn, that's a reason to separate the process of creating growth forecasts from the process of negotiating rescue packages. For the IMF, for example, the same teams that work on forecasting growth and debt levels help to design lending and reform packages, reporting to the same leadership team. That means the fund only needs one set of country experts. But it also makes life for those experts far more straightforward if they err on the side of optimism in their forecasts. The economic monitoring and forecast teams should be in a completely separate institutional structure from those deciding on lending and loan conditions.
If only Greece, Europe, and the IMF had accepted a role for external and independent growth forecasts rather than cooking up their own, perhaps they could have arranged a more sustainable package of relief earlier, rather than shunting the problem–and Greece’s recovery—down the road. The same applies to numerous other debt discussions–and the problem will continue until the people making the predictions don’t have every incentive to use a rose-tinted crystal ball.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-08/a-lesson-from-greece-beware-the-prophets-of-boom
How optimism can trip up countries in debt
by Charles Kenny
July 8, 2015 — 10:16 AM EDT
Photographer: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg
In 2010, as Greece signed a bailout deal with the International Monetary Fund, forecasts by the IMF and the European Commission suggested the country’s debt-to-GDP ratio would peak below 150 percent of gross domestic product in 2012. The forecasts also projected that Greek GDP in 2015 would be 8 percent larger than in 2011. This optimistic vision of the future was based on underlying assumptions that Greece would go from having the lowest productivity growth in the euro zone to among the highest, alongside the highest labor force participation rates and employment rates equal to Germany’s.
No one—including the IMF—believes those assumptions anymore. The latest estimates suggest Greek GDP will be 10 percent smaller than in 2011. Why were those early prognostications so rosy? It turns out that the IMF, the EU, and other institutions have a tradition of consistently overoptimistic growth forecasts in times of crisis. Dealing with that tendency would significantly reduce the harm done by future financial crises.
Debt climbs when economies falter. Using a sample of developing countries, New York University economist Bill Easterly showed in a recent paper that the pace of growth has a strong association with debt levels. He suggested that developing economies that experienced accelerated growth between 1975 and 1994 saw debt-to-GDP ratios increase by 1 percent per annum. Countries that saw growth rates fall, on the other hand, saw debt-to-GDP climb far faster—between 3 percent per annum for those that saw modest slowdowns to 7 percent for those that saw the sharpest declines. In his analysis, he demonstrated how the same pattern applied to countries in the euro zone after the financial crisis.
At the same time, Easterly showed that countries in debt crises are prone to especially optimistic growth forecasts. Just as the IMF and the European Commission have for Greece, the World Bank and IMF drew up growth forecasts for these countries to predict debt sustainability. Easterly found that forecasts for highly indebted poor countries in the 1990s and early 2000s were consistently too positive in their estimates–overpredicting growth by an average of 1 percent a year. IMF researchers agree with him: Hans Gemberg and Andrew Martinez of the fund’s Independent Evaluation Office suggest the organization’s forecasts “tended to be consistently over-optimistic in times of country-specific, regional, and global recessions.”
Looking at European Commission forecasts of government expenditure as a percentage of GDP, António Afonso and Jorge Silva of the University of Lisbon find (PDF) that the commission similarly and systematically forecast lower government expenditure-to-GDP ratios than occurred. The commission’s forecasts for one year out were off by an average of 0.4 percent of GDP over the period 1999 to 2011—and around 84 percent of the error was due to overconfidence about GDP growth rates. The optimistic inaccuracy about the government’s fiscal situation fed into similarly overoptimistic government debt-to-GDP predictions. As with the IMF, the commission’s forecasts have been particularly distorted for Greece, Ireland, and Portugal—the crisis countries receiving IMF and European support.
It isn’t hard to figure out why it's tempting to forecast faster growth when debt levels are rising: It's a way to avoid painful choices. Easterly showed that the U.S. Office of Management and Budget cranked up growth forecasts after 2001 so that lower taxes combined with increased spending on defense and homeland security could look fiscally responsible.
For highly indebted poor countries and the World Bank, as much as for Greece and its creditors, strong growth forecasts make higher debt levels look sustainable. If the economy grows, so will government revenues. From the point of view of the debtor country, the bigger revenues grow, the less need to cut spending to allow for debt payments. From the point of view of creditors, the bigger revenues grow, the less need to forgive debt to make payments a sustainable burden.
In turn, that's a reason to separate the process of creating growth forecasts from the process of negotiating rescue packages. For the IMF, for example, the same teams that work on forecasting growth and debt levels help to design lending and reform packages, reporting to the same leadership team. That means the fund only needs one set of country experts. But it also makes life for those experts far more straightforward if they err on the side of optimism in their forecasts. The economic monitoring and forecast teams should be in a completely separate institutional structure from those deciding on lending and loan conditions.
If only Greece, Europe, and the IMF had accepted a role for external and independent growth forecasts rather than cooking up their own, perhaps they could have arranged a more sustainable package of relief earlier, rather than shunting the problem–and Greece’s recovery—down the road. The same applies to numerous other debt discussions–and the problem will continue until the people making the predictions don’t have every incentive to use a rose-tinted crystal ball.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-08/a-lesson-from-greece-beware-the-prophets-of-boom
88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
How one weeping man put a face on Greece’s debt crisis
By Andrew Katz July 8 at 3:30 AM
some have said crystallizes the despair felt across Greece, a country in the grips of a spiraling financial crisis.
Giorgos Chatzifotiadis, an elderly man in Thessaloniki, sat down in front of a crowd and cried last Friday after he waited for hours in front of numerous banks to withdraw cash but was unable to do so. Chatzifotiadis was among many pensioners who aimed to take out money on the fifth day of the bank closures, after hundreds of branches had reopened for those without bank cards to withdraw 120 euros.
AFP photographer Sakis Mitrolidis recalled the scene in a blog post on Tuesday, writing that he and reporters from a TV channel approached the man and began to chat. After the 77-year-old explained his story, the journalists accompanied him to talk to a bank employee. “Fortunately,” he said, “they were able to help him.”
"I see my fellow citizens begging for a few cents to buy bread,” Chatzifotiadis told the photographer at the time. “I see more and more suicides. I am a sensitive person. I cannot stand to see my country in this distress. That's why I feel so beaten, more than for my own personal problems.”
It wasn’t until later that Mitrolidis understood what he had captured. “Back in my office, when I saw the pictures on the monitor, I understood this was a powerful series,” he writes. “The composition, the papers scattered beside him, the policeman coming to help, the people watching as they queued, and the old man himself.”
The reaction came shortly after he filed the images. The image above, in particular, was shared widely on social media, serving as a snapshot of a nation's wider turmoil and anguish.
It also reinforced the plight faced by Greek pensioners. More than 20 percent of Greece’s population in 2014 was 65 or older, according to the European Union’s statistics office, up 2.5 percent from a decade earlier.
Mitrolidis worked to find Chatzifotiadis the next day, but wound up speaking with his daughter, who said her parents went to Germany decades earlier but in recent years had returned to be closer to family.
Acknowledging the largely positive feedback, Mitrolidis writes that he doesn’t think of the picture as the signature image of the chaos in Greece. “I don’t see it that way,” he writes. “I think it tells part of the story.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/07/08/greece-crying-man-banks/?tid=sm_fb
photo in link
By Andrew Katz July 8 at 3:30 AM
some have said crystallizes the despair felt across Greece, a country in the grips of a spiraling financial crisis.
Giorgos Chatzifotiadis, an elderly man in Thessaloniki, sat down in front of a crowd and cried last Friday after he waited for hours in front of numerous banks to withdraw cash but was unable to do so. Chatzifotiadis was among many pensioners who aimed to take out money on the fifth day of the bank closures, after hundreds of branches had reopened for those without bank cards to withdraw 120 euros.
AFP photographer Sakis Mitrolidis recalled the scene in a blog post on Tuesday, writing that he and reporters from a TV channel approached the man and began to chat. After the 77-year-old explained his story, the journalists accompanied him to talk to a bank employee. “Fortunately,” he said, “they were able to help him.”
"I see my fellow citizens begging for a few cents to buy bread,” Chatzifotiadis told the photographer at the time. “I see more and more suicides. I am a sensitive person. I cannot stand to see my country in this distress. That's why I feel so beaten, more than for my own personal problems.”
It wasn’t until later that Mitrolidis understood what he had captured. “Back in my office, when I saw the pictures on the monitor, I understood this was a powerful series,” he writes. “The composition, the papers scattered beside him, the policeman coming to help, the people watching as they queued, and the old man himself.”
The reaction came shortly after he filed the images. The image above, in particular, was shared widely on social media, serving as a snapshot of a nation's wider turmoil and anguish.
It also reinforced the plight faced by Greek pensioners. More than 20 percent of Greece’s population in 2014 was 65 or older, according to the European Union’s statistics office, up 2.5 percent from a decade earlier.
Mitrolidis worked to find Chatzifotiadis the next day, but wound up speaking with his daughter, who said her parents went to Germany decades earlier but in recent years had returned to be closer to family.
Acknowledging the largely positive feedback, Mitrolidis writes that he doesn’t think of the picture as the signature image of the chaos in Greece. “I don’t see it that way,” he writes. “I think it tells part of the story.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/07/08/greece-crying-man-banks/?tid=sm_fb
photo in link
88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
French PM sells Greece diplomacy to divided Parliament
© FRANCE 24 Screengrab | French Prime Minister Manuel Valls addresses the National Assembly on July 8, 2015
Text by Sruthi GOTTIPATI
Latest update : 2015-07-08
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls told Parliament on Wednesday that Greece must remain within the euro zone, in a speech in which he tried to convince a divided French political class to show unity in its response to the Greek crisis.
Even as France tries to draw a hardening Germany and a hostile Greece closer together, PresidentFrançois Hollande has struggled to forge a common stance on the pressing issue back home.
France “refuses a Greek exit from the Eurozone,” Valls insisted, adding that accepting such a move would be an admission of weakness. Instead, he said, France was doing “everything it can to bring all parties to a compromise.”
Valls’s comments, which included a staunch defence of Hollande’s handling of the crisis, were met with derision from opposition lawmakers in Parliament. Critics accuse Hollande of alienating France’s traditional ally Germany, which has turned cold toward debt-stricken Greece’s as it rejects austerity measures in return for a new bailout package.
"Mr Tsipras is not looking for an agreement, but is arm wrestling against Greece's European partners. Siriza's behavior has been irresponsible", declared MP Pierre Lequiller, a member of the main opposition Les Républicains party.
Hollande also faces criticism from fellow Socialists, some of whom accuse him of not doing enough to help Greece and its left-wing Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, whom they see as a natural ally.
Rebels within Hollande’s party went as far as to join protests in Paris, in which around 3,000 French demonstrators urged Greeks to reject a bailout deal with international creditors.
Greece now has to propose a reform plan on Thursday in order to reach a deal ahead of a European Union summit on Sunday. Failing to convince its European partners could push Greek banks toward collapse and the country out of the eurozone.
Looking to 2017
While former president Nicolas Sarkozy’s Les Républicains has hardened its stance toward tje Greek government – saying that Tsipras is no longer in a position to negotiate – France’s far right anti-EU National Front party, has ecstatically welcomed a Greek exit, as it could make way for other countries, including France, to abandon the euro.
Both Sarkozy and Le Pen are likely to contest the French presidential elections in 2017. Opinion polls show Hollande trailing behind, in part due to the dismal performance of the French economy.
Still, Hollande has previously shown that his handling of international crises have boosted his popularity. By advocating for Greece, he would be directly appealing to his leftwing base.
http://www.france24.com/en/20150708-greece-france-divided-valls-hollande-grexit
© FRANCE 24 Screengrab | French Prime Minister Manuel Valls addresses the National Assembly on July 8, 2015
Text by Sruthi GOTTIPATI
Latest update : 2015-07-08
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls told Parliament on Wednesday that Greece must remain within the euro zone, in a speech in which he tried to convince a divided French political class to show unity in its response to the Greek crisis.
Even as France tries to draw a hardening Germany and a hostile Greece closer together, PresidentFrançois Hollande has struggled to forge a common stance on the pressing issue back home.
France “refuses a Greek exit from the Eurozone,” Valls insisted, adding that accepting such a move would be an admission of weakness. Instead, he said, France was doing “everything it can to bring all parties to a compromise.”
Valls’s comments, which included a staunch defence of Hollande’s handling of the crisis, were met with derision from opposition lawmakers in Parliament. Critics accuse Hollande of alienating France’s traditional ally Germany, which has turned cold toward debt-stricken Greece’s as it rejects austerity measures in return for a new bailout package.
"Mr Tsipras is not looking for an agreement, but is arm wrestling against Greece's European partners. Siriza's behavior has been irresponsible", declared MP Pierre Lequiller, a member of the main opposition Les Républicains party.
Hollande also faces criticism from fellow Socialists, some of whom accuse him of not doing enough to help Greece and its left-wing Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, whom they see as a natural ally.
Rebels within Hollande’s party went as far as to join protests in Paris, in which around 3,000 French demonstrators urged Greeks to reject a bailout deal with international creditors.
Greece now has to propose a reform plan on Thursday in order to reach a deal ahead of a European Union summit on Sunday. Failing to convince its European partners could push Greek banks toward collapse and the country out of the eurozone.
Looking to 2017
While former president Nicolas Sarkozy’s Les Républicains has hardened its stance toward tje Greek government – saying that Tsipras is no longer in a position to negotiate – France’s far right anti-EU National Front party, has ecstatically welcomed a Greek exit, as it could make way for other countries, including France, to abandon the euro.
Both Sarkozy and Le Pen are likely to contest the French presidential elections in 2017. Opinion polls show Hollande trailing behind, in part due to the dismal performance of the French economy.
Still, Hollande has previously shown that his handling of international crises have boosted his popularity. By advocating for Greece, he would be directly appealing to his leftwing base.
http://www.france24.com/en/20150708-greece-france-divided-valls-hollande-grexit