The most crucial Eurogroup on Greece

In the Eurogroup meeting, Finance minister Yannis Stournaras will ask his EU counterparts to give the green light to the lenders for the disbursement of the tranche. But the international creditors do not seem willing to give money to Greece before seeing the key measures passed by parliament being implemented.

The maximum that Stournaras hopes to elicit in Brussels today is a political commitment that the approval of the tranche will come in early December and the disbursement will follow probably on December 5. Until then the government must put all the hard measures, about which Greece’s partners and creditors are mistrustful, on an implementation track.

The climate at the Eurogroup will not be very friendly for Stournaras, although he will present the voted mid-term program, the new state budget and the two legislative acts with the prerequisites.

Brussels, though, is not satisfied with just laws and regulations. This was proven on Monday evening with the email by the Troika auditors that raised an issue of layoffs rather than availability of 25,000 employees by 2014. It showed the mistrust inside and outside Greece about what exactly has been agreed and how it will be applied. IMF auditors allegedly question the commitments made by the government and are asking for layoffs instead of redundancies, leading to Greece saying that "we are not talking about layoffs" and the IMF withdrawing its demands.

As it appears, the decision of the Eurogroup will be judged at a political level, while within the bosom of the EU many officials are beginning to react to the excessive pressure by Berlin, mainly for more decisive and tough measures. Jean-Claude Juncker and Mario Pronti say that this attitude helps neither Athens nor Europe, agreeing on the ascertainment that our country has already done a lot and that what separates it from the tranche is just details.