The European Stability Mechanism will release the first tranche of funds to enable Athens to meet a €3.2bn bond repayment due to the European Central Bank on Thursday.
A significant minority of Merkel’s conservatives may vote against the €86bn bailout, sending the government a warning that the latest package is its last chance to keep debt-ridden Greece in the 19-country euro zone.
The article referred to the deal as being the “first fire sale under a SYRIZA government” and a “large present to [Angela] Merkel and [Wolfgang] Schaeuble, clearly in return for their services in the formation of the new, deplorable memorandum”.
A Greek minister gave on Monday the strongest indication yet that the government will call a confidence vote following a rebellion among lawmakers from the ruling Syriza party over the country’s new bailout deal.
Finance ministers of the 19-nation euro single currency group have approved the first 26 billion euros ($29 billion) of a vast new bailout package to help rebuild Greece’s shattered economy.
Mr Schaeuble says he backs the new bailout deal – although he had earlier put forward a plan for Greece to take a “time out” from the euro, in order to stabilise its precarious finances.
“We welcome the successful vote in the Greek Parliament this morning”, said German Foreign Ministry spokesman Sebastian Fischer, whose country has been the single largest contributor to Greece’s previous two bailouts and is the country’s harshest critic.
The €85 billion package – which introduces sweeping austerity measures – was ultimately approved with support from opposition parties after an all-night parliamentary session.
The bill on the rescue deal passed just in time for Greek Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos to head to Brussels to meet his counterparts from the 19-country currency union in the hope of getting their seal of approval as well.
Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’s Syriza party looked set to split after the leader of its far-left faction called for a new movement to fight a bailout deal that lawmakers will vote on later on Thursday.
This means the country would not get its debt pile down to 120pc of GDP – long viewed by the global Monetary Fund (IMF) as the target to get Athens back to a sustainable debt level – until 2030, two decades after the country’s first bail-out.
Is the worldwide Monetary Fund on board? The first tranche of bailout funds will flow to Greece once its fellow eurozone nations agree. At this stage it is unclear. We still need to talk with each other on a few issues. Greece will only avoid the threat of “Grexit” if...