A Deal That Preserves Greece’s Place in Eurozone, and Fiscal Restraints

BRUSSELS — Just a month ago, after being propelled to power by a wave of anger at Greece’s economic miseries, Alexis Tsipras declared his Syriza party’s election victory the start of a Europe-wide revolt against austerity. “Europe is going to change,” he said before setting off on a tour of European capitals to rally support for a more relaxed new direction.

The “anti-austerity revolution” proclaimed by Syriza and its fans elsewhere, however, has now fizzled, its passions doused by the political reality that leaders in the rest of Europe do not want to join or, more important, finance the Greek-led revolt.

Greece’s hoped-for new dawn for Europe ended on a rain-drenched Friday evening in the Justus Lipsius Building, a huge, Soviet-style Brussels office block where finance ministers from the 19 countries that use the euro — known as the Eurogroup — had gathered for their third emergency meeting in two weeks.

A deal negotiated there lifted the threat of bankruptcy hanging over Greece and with it the immediate risk that it might have to leave the eurozone and the 28-member European Union, an exit that would have delivered a grave blow to Europe’s six-decade drive for integration.

But an agreement to extend Greece’s bailout for four months also committed it to honor fiscal targets and other conditions it had vowed to scrap and left intact the supervising role of the so-called troika — a trio of creditor bodies that Syriza wanted banished, viewing it as the hated symbol of their country’s subordination to so-called “neo-liberal” economic dogma. Moreover, the finance ministers made clear that Greece will not get any more cash until it satisfies them that it can keep a lid on spending, setting the stage for yet more tense negotiations in coming days and weeks.

But the Portuguese minister, Maria Luís Albuquerque, spoke in Berlin of very different lessons from austerity. She proudly detailed how Portugal had endured and emerged from a bailout aimed at mending her nation’s tattered finances. It was all about “regaining credibility” and sticking to rules, she said.

The next day, just a few hours before his finance minister flew to Brussels, Mr. Tsipras continued his own campaign to show that Greece was not beholden to Germany or other creditors and had friends elsewhere. He boarded a visiting Chinese warship in the Greek port of Piraeus and spoke of the “special importance” of investment from China.

 

Gaia Pianigiani contributed reporting from Rome.

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