ATHENS, Greece, July 22 (UPI) — Only weeks after defaulting on a loan to international creditors and rejecting terms for relief aid, the Greek government has completed a second round of economic reforms required for the nation to receive a third bailout package amid its ongoing debt crisis, officials said Wednesday.
A vast majority in Greece’s parliament approved the overhauls early Thursday, local time, which fulfills a requirement by creditors to begin new talks for a new bailout. Of the 300 members of parliament, 230 approved the reforms — including opponents of the nation’s ruling Syriza party.
Former Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, who opposed the first proposal, voted ‘yes’ this time around, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.
The vote is a critical step forward for cash-strapped Athens as it tries to navigate through a fiscal labyrinth littered with debt and, possibly still, the prospect of expulsion from the euro.
“Europe’s conservative forces have achieved a Pyrrhic victory over Greece, but have lost their dominance,” a somewhat defiant Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras told lawmakers before the vote, also claiming that those conservatives would still like to see Greece booted from the euro.
Talks to secure up to $93 billion in relief funds would begin immediately after parliament passed the final round of reforms, Tsipras said.
The bill passed Thursday, which is nearly 1,000 pages long, adopts new rules for bank bailouts — putting a penalty on private investors in the event taxpayer money is needed, as well as new civil-law code, the Journal report said.
For months, Tsipras resisted terms of relief aid because they demanded reforms on workers’ wages and state-funded pensions. However, those are still issues Greece will have to resolve in the near future to receive the new aid package the prime minister agreed to.
An $8 billion emergency loan, received Monday, allowed Athens to make up missed payments to the International Monetary Fund and pay a debt to the European Central Bank. More IMF loan repayments are due next month, but Greece will be able to avoid defaulting on those obligations if the bailout is completed soon.
Also Wednesday, the European Central Bank agreed to increase emergency assets available to Greece to help the government stay afloat.
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