‘Greece can help Europe find its path again,” President Pavlopoulos tells ERT




Greece will overcome the crisis and continue its progress within the European Union, President of the Hellenic Republic Prokopis Pavlopoulos said on Sunday, in an interview with the state broadcaster ERT. He also noted that Greece could help Europe recover its unity and realise that it must correct the “shortcomings” revealed under the pressure of the financial and refugee crises.

“Greece can help Europe find its way again,” he said, noting that Europe had to make a “change of course” and had been unprepared to face the “global economic war” that broke out in 2008 with the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

Pavlopoulos said that the austerity imposed in response to the high Greek deficit, unalleviated by any social welfare policy, “created a huge debt crisis that is the greatest problem in the Eurozone.” Europe’s reactions then converted this crisis into a banking crisis, since it did not have a flexible central bank capable of dealing with the situation that arose.

Greece with its high deficits had been the “weak link” at that time and once again proved Europe unready to deal with the problem with a European programme. It turned to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and this had imposed a programme on Greece that had been “problematic” from the start, Pavlopoulos said, with mistaken calculations that served to deepen the recession and the debt crisis, rather than resolve it.

Regarding Greece’s debt, Pavlopoulos said a nominal debt haircut was not possible, especially after the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) was set up, since this explicitly forbid debt reduction. Debt relief was, however, absolutely essential and this could now be achieved through lower interest rates and deferred repayments, he added. Regarding interest rates, he pointed out that other countries were currently borrowing at much lower rates, while Greece had a debt to the IMF, whose interest rates were quite high.

Regarding foreign policy issues and relations with Turkey, in particular, the president stressed that the only legitimate difference with Turkey was that over delineating the continental shelf around the Greek islands.

“All the rest does not exist. It is  resolved through the rules of international law and, in particular, the Treaty of Lausanne, which defines the borders of Greece and the EU,” the president stated.

Regarding the Cyprus issue, Pavlopoulos said that this must be resolved on the basis of a European solution only, since Cyprus was a member-state of the EU.

Commenting on the EU accession hopes of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), the president warned that Skopje must be aware that first-order European law requires a country wishing to join the EU not to have irredentist aims against others, since it was then in violation of the European body of law.

This was especially true “when you have a name that literally shouts irredentism,” he added. Pavlopoulos noted that a country called on to decide whether FYROM should join the EU would have a right to raise a veto…”the veto, therefore, exists because the state of FYROM does not meet the requirements of European laws and this is not a Greek position, it is a European position,” he said.

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