Greece’s prime minister accused his country’s creditors of attempting to “blackmail” Greek voters with threats of being forced out of the euro, defiantly urging them to vote No in a referendum on whether he should accept tough terms for bailout aid.
Despite increasingly urgent pleas from EU leaders to either abandon the Sunday plebicite or back a Yes campaign, Alexis Tsipras instead called them “extremist conservative forces” that had forced the shut-down of his country’s banks “to blackmail the government and, through the government, each and every citizen.”
“It is unacceptable to see these images of shame in Europe of solidarity and respect,” Mr Tsipras said in a nationally-televised address. “They decided to close the banks because the govenr9ment decided to give people a say, and they caused so much hardship to the elderly.”
Mr Tsipras’ hardline stance came despite a major climbdown just hours earlier in his talks with creditors. In a letter send to bailout monitors, Mr Tsipras accepted most of the terms of an economic reform plan that had been tabled at the weekend.
Eurozone officials said the remaining concessions Mr Tsipras is seeking were “not a handful of minor changes” and were not the basis for a new €29.1bn bailout programme Athens is now seeking. But the concilatory letter followed by another defiant speech left EU officials confused over Mr Tsipras’ intentions.
