Greek president meets leaders as political impasse continues
ATHENS Days before the deadline for it to form a government, Greece President Karolos Papoulias Monday began meeting political leaders to urge them to form a new government, but the political impasse continued.
The debt-hit country needs to form a government before June when the next installment of bailout funds is due.
Alexis Tsipras, head of the radical leftist Syriza group, has meanwhile announced that he would not attend the talks. His party had come in the second place in the May 6 parliamentary elections on the plank of opposing the austerity measures demanded by the EU and IMF.
Tsipras said he was willing to meet one-on-one with President Papoulias or with all party leaders except the far-right Golden Dawn group.
Papoulias had met the leaders on Sunday too, but without any success.
Greece has until Thursday to come up with a government or call new elections.
"If no government is in place before June when the next installment (of loan money) from the European Union and International Monetary Fund is due, we estimate that Greece will run out of money sometime between the end of June and beginning of July, at which point a return to the drachma would seem inevitable," Bank of America/Merrill Lynch wrote in a report released Friday.
The Syriza party insists that any new government has to cancel austerity measures agreed in return for EU-IMF loans worth $170 billion.
European Commission head Jose Manuel Barroso and other European figures have warned that Greece has to respect the terms of the bailout deal if it wants to remain in the euro.
Source: Europe News.Net
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