Brussels - Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras surrendered to European demands for immediate action to qualify for up to 86 billion euros ($96 billion) of aid he needs to keep his country in the euro.
After a six-month offensive against austerity succeeded only in derailing Greece’s economy and deepening its financial mess, there was no face-saving compromise on offer for Tsipras at a rancorous euro-area summit that ran for more than 17 hours.
“Trust has to be rebuilt, the Greek authorities have to take on responsibility for what they agreed to,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel said after the meeting ended just before 9am in Brussels on Monday. “It now hinges on step-by-step implementation of what we agreed.”
The agreement shifts the spotlight to the parliament in Athens, where lawmakers from Tsipras’s Syriza party mutinied when he sought their endorsement for spending cuts, pensions savings and tax increases in a vote early Saturday.
With Greece running out of money and its banks shut the past two weeks, the summit was billed as the country’s last chance to stay in the euro. Greece has been in financial limbo since the government missed a payment to the International Monetary Fund and allowed its second rescue package to lapse on June 30.
The Stoxx Europe 600 Index climbed 1.3 percent at 8.26am in London, while futures on the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index erased a drop to rise 0.4 percent.
The conditions that Tsipras accepted comprised a laundry list of unfinished business from Greece’s two previous bailouts and a new demand for the government to transfer 50 billion euros of state assets to a holding company that will seek to either sell or generate cash from them. His creditors rejected Tsipras’s pleas for a cut in the nominal value of Greek debt.
Merkel said interest-payment grace periods and longer maturities will “be discussed once there is a successful evaluation of the new Greek programme”.
* With assistance from Nikos Chrysoloras and Marcus Bensasson in Athens, Kevin Costelloe, Patrick Donahue, James G. Neuger, Stephanie Bodoni, Ott Ummelas, Radoslav Tomek, Esteban Duarte, Jonathan Stearns, Mark Deen and David De Jong in Brussels, Angela Cullen in Frankfurt and Elco van Groningen in Amsterdam
Bloomberg