PM Tsipras rejects Commission report as dictated by “ultra-conservatives in Brussels”

The European Commission on Wednesday said pension payouts and tax breaks announced by Tsipras’s administration last month risked derailing agreed fiscal targets for Greece. Athens disagrees.

Tsipras said his government sought to mitigate the impact of austerity on a public which had suffered enough.

Egged on by the election result, Tsipras said, those ‘ultra conservative circles’ in Brussels had got to the point of suggesting dismissals of short-term contract workers in the civil service.

“We haven’t had that issue since 2014,” he said, in a pointed reference to the year before his election and when a coalition of New Democracy and Socialist PASOK was in power.

The Greek people must know the truth, Tsipras said, that since Mitsotakis raised the issue of a 1:5 hiring-layoff/retirement ratio in the public sector, as a government SYRIZA managed to change the ratio to 1:1. 

In its post-bailout surveillance report on Wednesday, the Commission said it anticipated Greece would have to reduce its contract workers by about 1,550 people. The country had not respected a ceiling on temporary staff in 2018, it said. [reuters, amna]