by Magda Panoutsopoulou
ATHENS, Greece
Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras is to meet on Tuesday with the leaders of several opposition parties, reportedly to sound them out for voting on a possible bailouot agreement in parliament.
Tsipras will meet with Fofi Gennimata, the newly elected leader of the PASOK party, and with Potami chief Stavros Theodorakis. Tsipras called the meetings himself.
Despite these lobbying efforts, in a speech on Monday, Tsipras said that "creditors are pillaging Greece," and vowed that no further compromise would be made to achieve an agreement.
The Greek government leaked a copy of its formal proposals to the creditors to the newspaper Kathimerini. The document shows efforts at compromise on key issues like the amount of budget surplus that the government must maintain. The creditors, however, rejected this offer out of hand on Wednesday.
The Eurogroup again meets with the Greek delegation in Brussels on Thursday, it will be the last chance to reach a compromise before Greece is faced with default on its loan payments.
Fofi Gennimata, elected the fifth PASOK President with 51 percent of the votes on Monday, will bring a new voice to the fraught debate in the Greek parliament
The first female leader of the party since its foundation, Gennimata has called for a "stable European perspective." Her party, although officially Socialist, takes a centrist and Western view.
Genimata was elected super-prefect for Athens and Piraeus 2003–07 and has served as Deputy Minister for Health 2009–10 and Education 2010–11 under the PASOK administration. She also served as a Deputy Minister of National Defense from June 2013 –January 2015 during the New Democracy and Pasok coalition government.
She replaces Evangelos Venizelos, who recently stepped down from the party’s leadership, one year before the completion of his term after the defeat of his party in the recent national elections.
PASOK was established by Andreas Papandreou in 1974 and dominated Greek politics for more than 30 years. But in recent years, it has lost popular support and taken on a more minor role. Papandreou is blamed for having made the original bailout agreement with Greece's creditors in 2010.
