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It is the danger of when one is very tired of the behaviour of someone else who does not step back despite the fact that his position is not successful. The creditors are tired because they have been listening to promises, without seeing concrete proposals. And the proposals presented to them do not include specific ways of implementing the measures on the part of the Greek government nor are they combined with actions to restore confidence between the two sides. Their tiredness may make them say at any time, "We have paid too much attention to the problem of Greece. Sorry, but we are out of money or we have decided to grant it somewhere else."

The creditors in turn exhausted us too because as I said they spared too much time for negotiations. It was too much for a problem that had already been discussed and the measures to be taken to address it were obvious.

The other issue is that some of the measures suggested by the creditors would unfortunately deepen the problem of recession and unemployment to a certain extent. They could have avoided this.

What measures do you have in mind?

For example, the big pressure on austerity measures. I fully understand that the Greek government must attain a budgetary surplus, probably it will have to cut the salaries and pensions of civil servants, and increase some taxes. The creditors strongly insist on the implementation of these measures because they want to have guarantees that, at some point, Greece will start to pay its huge external debt.

But at the same time, that pressure is exhausting and ultimately, does not produce results. The creditors could easily have been insistent on implementing structural reforms, including the liberalization of closed professions that have remained closed although the relevant laws have been voted. They could be insistent on the privatization of large state companies, as well as on reforming the labour law in the private sector so that it would become more flexible. I mean to agree on a minimum income to allow employers to hire and lay off staff more easily. At the same time, the state would be able to pay higher unemployment benefits, for a longer period, or a minimum guaranteed income, as many other countries do.

All these are structural measures that have nothing to do with austerity measures. I believe that Greece's creditors are assertive in the wrong direction, because the Greek government would eventually be forced to implement austerity measures and thus, it would actually be able to achieve what it probably wanted from the start, namely not affect the Greek production model in any way.

Do you think Athens and its creditors will come to agreement?

Yes, it will happen at the last moment, at the very last moment, shortly before banks have announced that they have no money and after an agreement on a series of austerity measures that would be much more painful than those that former Minister of Finance Gikas Hardouvelis had proposed in an e-mail to the creditors last December.

Would it be voted in parliament?

I heard a representative of SYRIZA, who said on the radio that, in such cases, some of his colleagues in the parliamentary group of SYRIZA possibly would not vote or would vote against it. The support for the measures would come from the pro-European parties, thus securing the necessary majority without the government losing the confidence of parliament.

However, if it happens more than a few times and the government majority does not support the bills, it will obviously mean that the government is not stable.

Do you think the government would be able to implement austerity measures?

This is another very serious problem. It is much greater than the voting on them. All professional groups that would be affected such as pharmacists, teachers in state hairdressing institutes, etc. still believe that the changes would not affect them.

Therefore, at some point, major social conflicts would occur and in the best case, they would be in the form of protest marches and strikes by individual groups, each of which would fight for its own interests. This means that there would be no major protests, because as you know, the large-scale protests and strikes over the past five years had been organized by parties. This could not happen with a strike of pharmacists, notaries etc.

The worst-case scenario is that, due to the tragic government policy in the sector of public security and order, there could be even clashes in the streets.

Could a new agreement provoke political changes in Greece?

One possible change could be the withdrawal of the parliamentary majority of 163 MPs today so that their number would become 153. In this way, the government would no longer be as stable as it is today.

Another possible change would be the fall of the cabinet and early elections. The third would be the composition of a government of technocrats and politicians from different parties that on the one hand could easily implement the austerity measures and on the other would allow SYRIZA not to bear the full political burden of the implementation of measures in which it itself does not believe.

Thus, a purely technocratic or mixed technocratic and political and government would implement the measures, satisfy the parties and enable the country to find its feet.