Greece is no closer to reaching a deal with its creditors with each side pointing to the other as the reason for the failure.
Another deadline securing a deal expired on Sunday and acquiring the necessary €7.2 billion in rescue aid looked grim. Greece is expected to make four payments totaling almost 1.6 billion euros ($1.78 billion) to the International Monetary Fund this month.
The bailout package backed by the euro region expires at the end of June and despite talks between Athens and its euro zone and (IMF) creditors, no one is holding out any hope for a successful conclusion.
Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras accused its creditors of making "absurd" demands and seeking to impose "harsh punishment" on Athens, countering that it wasn’t the obduracy of his four-month-old administration that was at fault.
“The lack of an agreement so far is not due to the supposed intransigent, uncompromising and incomprehensible Greek stance,” Tsipras told the French newspaper Le Monde an on Sunday. “It is due to the insistence of certain institutional actors on submitting absurd proposals and displaying a total indifference to the recent democratic choice of the Greek people.”
Five Months of Negotiations
Discussions are now in their fifth month and Greece is due to make a €300 million loan repayment to the International Monetary Fund at the end of this week. An additional €1.2 billion in IMF payments comes due over the next two weeks.
According to Chief of Merkel’s Christian Democrat-led bloc, Greece’s partners are doing what they can to keep Athens in the euro but feel that the “the ball is in Greece’s court” to comply with the provisions of the agreement made to date.