Former Greek finance minister and head of the Socialist party Evangelos Venizelos said on Tuesday that it will be “almost impossible” for Greece to cut back spending by €11.5 billion ($14.1 billion) over the coming two years, the amount its rescue creditors demanded as part of the bailout deal.
Venizelos made his statement in a telephone interview one day prior to his planned meeting with new conservative Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras.
"It is very difficult, almost impossible for anyone to put cuts together worth €11.5 billion in 2013 and 2014," Venizelos said. "That difficulty has always been there, but the situation has deteriorated because of the predictions for the recession in 2012."
Samaras ran his campaign on promises to renegotiate the terms of Greece’s bailout deal. So far, however, Greece’s creditors do not seem interested in reformulating the terms of the emergency loans.
Greece has been dependent on the emergency loans for the past two years; but the extraordinarily harsh cutbacks, which were created to meet the fiscal goals of the creditors, have caused the country to become mired in a five-year recession which is becoming increasingly difficult to emerge from.
"From the start, in 2010, the big problem in our relationship with the troika, (the European Union, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund) has been that all the projections, all the macroeconomic numbers — and the most important one, the recession — have not turned out to be correct," Venizelos said.
"That means we keep having to make more adjustments, because as the gross domestic product goes down so does the (deficit-to-GDP) ratio gets worse and that brings trouble for the whole effort."
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