Greece defied its creditors and approved plans on Thursday to give its battered pensioners a one-off Christmas bonus after France’s president said it was wrong to prevent the country from taking “sovereign decisions”, reports FRANCE 24.
A group of eurozone finance ministers on Wednesday said they were suspending a deal clinched earlier this month to offer Greece short-term debt relief after prime minister Alexis Tsipras unexpectedly said he would grant low-income pensioners a pre-Christmas payoff.
Tsipras's move angered officials in Germany and several other member states, but French president François Hollande and his finance minister came to Tsipras's defence on Thursday in a sign of European divisions over how to handle Greece.
Tsipras, a leftist firebrand who swept to power in early 2015, promising to do away with austerity only to be forced into accepting another bailout months later, insisted the one-off fiscal break would not derail the economic targets outlined in Greece's bailout plan.
"I want to stress that these are measures that do not jeopardise the programme nor the primary surplus for 2016 and have no fiscal impact on 2017 and 2018," he told a news conference in Brussels.
Greece, Tsipras said, was meeting its bailout commitments “to the letter”. He was due to meet German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Friday.
Merkel said she anticipated there would be a discussion about the issue, but said she did not intend to get involved in negotiations on the Greek package.
As shadowboxing over dealing with Greece's conundrum deepened, lawmakers in Athens backed the decision to allocate 617 million euros ($642.54 million) – a surplus from savings – in a bonus to pensioners.
"[Greek] people have to see that sacrifices of now six, seven years are at last starting to pay off," Greek Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos said.
About 5,000 pensioners, jaded by those sacrifices and almost a dozen pension cuts that have pushed almost half of the country's elderly into poverty, marched peacefully through the streets of Athens on Thursday night.
"We came here to send a message. No more!" protesting pensioner Efstratios Bozos told Reuters. "Our pensions have become restaurant tips."
Arriving at the Brussels summit, France's Hollande said it was wrong to prevent Greece from taking "sovereign decisions" and suggested that eurozone ministers had not granted Athens sufficient debt relief.
"It is out of the question to ask for further additional efforts from Greece or prevent them from taking a number of sovereign measures that respect [its] commitments," Hollande said.