Papandreou in Brussels

Prime Minister George Papandreou will be in Brussels on Monday. At four in the afternoon will meet with European Council President Herman Van Rompuy and at 10:00 at night he will have a meeting with European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso.

On Sunday the Premier reiterated his call for national unity behind the government's latest batch of austerity measures and accelerated reforms, opening a three-day vote of confidence debate that winds up at midnight onTuesday with an open roll-call vote. (ana-mpa)
 
Papandreou invited Parliament to give his newly reshuffled government a renewed vote of conference, noting that the country is at a critical crossroads and warning that an image of division among the Greek people was not helping the country.
 
Warning that a disorderly bankruptcy would be catastrophic, Papandreou stressed that the country's lenders, the EU and the IMF, want to see Greece standing on its own two feet, adding that the problems would not be solved if the IMF was asked to leave, and warning also that the country's liquidity will be exhausted very soon without the disbursement of the fifth installment of the EC-ECB-IMF bailout package.
 
Papandreou asked for national consensus on several fundamental axes and a referendum on major changes which, as he said, will be included in an amended Constitution.
 
The axes for national understanding, as he said, include acknowledgement that the external debt and annual budget deficits constitute a national problem and that "we must be the first to put our house in order". He noted that Greece will not be able to borrow (on the international markets) in 2012 "and this is an unexpected new complication that we need to look straight in the eye, and not with our heads buried in the sand", Papandreou elaborated.