Troika visits Greece

(Vatican Radio) The troika’s back in town. That’s the refrain being heard, high and low, here in Athens these days, as Greece’s creditors from the IMF, European Central Bank and EU are here again to check on how well Greece is meeting its bailout terms.
As the three-member Troika got off the plane at Athens airport, Prime Minister Antonis Samaras huddled in emergency session with the leaders of the two other coalition parties in his government to work out some sort of negotiating stance.
The main sticking point is the Troika’s insistence that the Greek public sector shed up to 180,000 government jobs within the next two years. Samaras himself has admitted dragging his feet on this very sensitive issue, on the grounds that Greek unemployment has already achieved the dubious distinction of being Europe’s highest, at over 26 percent. That figure rises to a staggering 58 percent in the youth sector.
There’s also a lot of grass roots pressure among Greeks to scrap a hated property tax which is collected through electricity bills. Samaras’s small leftwing partner insists on the scrapping, throwing a question mark over whether the government can stay together. To be fair, though, the property tax has been the most successful tax Greece has ever had, despite its huge unpopularity, simply because not to pay it means having your electricity cut off.
The Troika is going to assess all this, but nobody here in Athens is holding his breath. In light of the recent lightning collapse of the Cypriot economy, few expect Greece’s creditors to have much sympathy with Samaras’s political problems.

Listen to the report from correspondent John Carr: