Greece: PM Tsipras Submits Resignation, Calls Snap Elections

Greece’s Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has announced he is resigning and has called an early election. Tsipras is listening to advice from government colleagues who are recommending that the polls should be held within September as well as those advocating that the snap elections should not be called before early October.

About 13 billion euros were allocated to a special account at the Bank of Greece to automatically repay a 3.4-billion-euro debt to the European Central Bank (ECB) due on Thursday, a 2.2 billion euro debt to the global Monetary Fund (IMF), and the rest to pay off the 7 billion euro bridging loan ESM granted to the country in July.

Accepting the conditions was a major reversal of policy for Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and the coalition government between his radical left Syriza party and the small nationalist Independent Greeks.

In recent parliamentary votes, a number of Syriza’s 149 lawmakers have withheld their support for laws pushed by Mr. Tsipras’s government to secure a new bailout from Europe.

My Tsipras, who swept to power in January after promising to oppose further European austerity, was expected to face a hard censure motion in the 300-seat Athens parliament in the next fortnight.

The planned election could help increase support in Greece for the bailout programme, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker’s chief-of-staff said.

The first is that dozens of Tsipras’s governing left-wing Syriza party lawmakers voted against the government on the bailout deal.

When Greece’s parliament passed the rescue package last Friday, one prominent Syriza rebel, Panagiotis Lafazanis, said Greece “no longer had a democracy… but a Eurozone dictatorship”. The party will probably come apart at the seams, as Greek politics realign more clearly into pro-bailout and anti-bailout factions. “We need to know whether or not the party has or does not have a majority”.

Mr Tsipras continues to enjoy popular support and is far ahead of his opposition rivals in opinion polls, although none have been published since the bailout agreement was finalized.

Another source said elections could be held on September 13.

The government had to close the banks at the end of June for three weeks as panicking savers pulled out billions, and imposed capital controls strictly limiting withdrawals from the banking system.