The extraordinary summit scheduled for Monday on Greece “is a positive development in the path towards the agreement. There will be a solution within the framework of EU rules and democracy, which will allow Greece to return to growth”. This is the opinion of the Greek premier Alexis Tsipras, who – in a statement reported by Bloomberg – is very confident about the outcome of the emergency summit convened for Monday 22 June at 19 pm by the President of the European Council, Donald Tusk.
The meeting, decided after the failed outcome of the Eurogroup on Thursday in Luxembourg, is deemed necessary to "urgently discuss Greece's situation at the highest political level," he wrote Tusk. It would therefore be the heads of state and government of the Eurozone who would decide, effectively bypassing the finance ministers.
To avoid slipping into the background – as foreseen by the strategy of Tsipras, who has always aimed to shift the negotiation from the technical level to the political one – the president of the Eurogroup, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, said yesterday evening that it would have been appropriate, in case of news from the Greek side to unblock the negotiations, for the Eurogroup to meet first. Not surprisingly, it was shortly thereafter decided to also convene the finance ministers on the same day before the Eurosummit
Yesterday, on the other hand, Dijsselbloem himself had not sent reassuring signals: "It is regrettable that so little progress has been made and that an agreement is not in sight", he said, explaining that the proposals received so far from Athens are " few" and that it is in any case the Greeks who "must present others".
Therefore, there will be two meetings on Monday: “First that of the Eurogroup and then that of the heads of state and government – explained the French Finance Minister, Michel Fir –, these are the two best contexts for taking a good decision on Greece, but it is up to the finance ministers to prepare the Eurosummit, which is why we will meet on Monday itself. We have entrusted the Commission, the ECB and the IMF with the task of discussing and evaluating the nature of these programmes, there is still a lot of work to be done to technically verify the credibility, the global structure, the sustainability of any agreement which must be sustainable for one and for the other".
For the European Central Bank, the Governing Council will meet in an emergency around noon today to discuss a possible increase in funds for Greek banks. The ECB had already raised the amount of ELA (Emergency liquidity assistance) funds from 83 to 84,1 billion on Wednesday.
