Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras over the weekend appeared confident that his leftist-rightist coalition government will continue to achieve memorandum-mandated and ambitious primary budget surpluses of 3.5 percent (of annual GDP), whereby it will not need to implement another round of agreed-to pension cuts.
In an address on the occasion of the opening of an annual trade fair in the northern city of Thessaloniki, Tsipras said that "based on the data and forecasts we have for 2019, the assessments and arguments of the IMF will not be confirmed."
The leftist Greek premier again singled out the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as the force that insists on a looming social security reduction, as of Jan. 1, 2019, which the Tsipras government agreed to with all institutional creditors in 2016, and subsequently ratified the measure through its slim Parliament majority.
"This position (against implementing the austerity measure), after we authenticate it from the statistics in the coming period, we will explain it to our European partners at the Commission, where we will present, just as other Eurozone member-states will, in mid October, our draft 2019 budget ... it already appears that our partners accept and are happy with the new fiscal reality that has emerged, but the same time we must explain to them that this measure (pension cuts), despite being unnecessary, fiscally speaking, is not a structural reform, but merely anti-growth."
The poll-trailing Tsipras government wants to avoid the political "hot potato" entailed with another round of pension cuts at all costs, given that 2019 is an election year, with municipal, European Parliament and a general election on the calendar.
