Greece battling 'fiscal waterboarding'

Greece's anti-austerity party leader said Tuesday that Athens will not be able to repay its debt while facing "fiscal waterboarding" and assured German taxpayers they had nothing to fear if his leftists win snap polls.
Alexis Tsipras wrote in a guest commentary in Germany's Handelsblatt business daily that recent claims the Greek economy was stabilising following austerity policies imposed by creditors were an "arbitrary distortion of the facts".
"The truth is that Greece's debts cannot be paid back as long as our economy is submitted to constant fiscal waterboarding," Tsipras, who heads the radical left-wing Syriza party, said.
His party wants to abandon the austerity policy imposed by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund as part of the country's 240-billion-euro ($282 billion) bailout.
Syriza is broadly expected to win snap elections on January 25 and wants to renegotiate Greece's bailout deal, writing off a large portion of the country's enormous debt.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said that Greece must stick to agreed economic reforms regardless of the results of the election.
Germany, as the paymaster for eurozone bailouts, spearheaded a drive to demand swingeing spending cuts in exchange for any aid, insisting that budgetary discipline offered the only long-term solution to the debt crisis.
"The German taxpayers have nothing to fear from a Syriza government," Tsipras said.
"To the contrary. Our goal is not to face-off with our partners, to receive more loans or a licence for new deficits," he added.
The goal, he said, was to stabilise the country, balance the primary budget and end the "bleeding of German and Greek taxpayers".
Source: AFP