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Despite the positive signals from Brussels that the creditors and Athens are close to agreeing on an extension of the memorandum, the International Monetary Fund today announced that the talks had been suspended and the members of the expert team were in Washington. Spokesman Jeffrey Rice stated that there were significant differences with the Greek government on many of the important issues and so far no progress had been made to overcome them.

The differences are mainly associated with VAT, the pension system and funding, as "figures should make sense," stated Rice. In his words, Director of International Monetary Fund Christine Lagarde "never leaves the negotiating table" and next week she will attend the meeting of the Eurogroup, which will discuss the Greek issue, adding that "the ball is now in the Greek field."

Following today's developments GRReporter presents the analysis of the difficult course of negotiations by Associate Professor in Political Science at the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at Athens University and a researcher at the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy Dimitris Sotiropoulos who talks with Anastasia Balezdrova.

Mr. Sotiropoulos, how would you comment on the hard line of Athens in the talks with the creditors?

Maintaining a hard line in any negotiations must be accompanied by concrete measures, such as economic ones. They in turn should be divided into measures that the country would not want to take, others that it could implement and a third group that it could accept after revising them.

The hard line itself leads to a stalemate namely because of the lack of such content and strategy. These measures should be included in a series of priorities. In the case of Athens, we see a position that shows the lack of strategy. It is clear from the protracted negotiations between the government and creditors as well as from the reactive, not proactive, position of the Greek government.

Therefore, maintaining a hard line that has no specific content makes no sense.

What is the major problem in the course of negotiations?

There were some consecutive problems and the majority of them were due to Greece.

The first was that the Greek government decided that its election victory was enough for it to start a "crusade" to change all economy-related policies in Europe, if not the decision-making processes on economic policies in the euro zone. It was a big mistake because no country, especially a small one, could consider itself a herald of new ideas.

The second strategic mistake of the Greek side was its assessment that it could buy time and that the protracting of negotiations could drive creditors to gradually move closer to its positions. The creditors, however, had no reason to hurry because not they needed funding but Greece.

The third mistake was that the Greek side was not aware of the intentions of the creditors to continue the bailout programmes. They were fairly "transparent" but I do not think that the representatives of the Greek government understood them. In addition, they were not familiar with how negotiations took place in the European bodies. They do not hold political discussions except in the lobbies in Brussels and Strasbourg or in private conversations between leaders during meetings such as the summits or in the Eurogroup. Each side there presents very concrete proposals. And before submitting them, it has attempted to form unions, but again on very specific things, for example, specific economic measures that are programmed in terms of time of application and that are calculated in advance. Greece, however, appeared both in informal and formal discussions to present only political ideas. They were not sufficient and proved that one could not achieve many things only with political debates.

The next mistake that could prove fatal was that the Greek side had no expertise. The party that won the elections in January anyway has an ambiguous attitude to the European Union. In the past, its predecessor Synaspismos often voted against it in ratifying the European treaties in the Greek parliament. However, SYRIZA claims it wants Greece to remain a member of the European Union. Its coalition partner, Independent Greeks, however, is openly an anti-European party.

Therefore, from the beginning, we had a government that did not know what it wanted to do with regard to Europe and that was not familiar with the technical details of the negotiations.

The European Commission, the International Monetary Fund and the Governing Council of the European Central Bank made mistakes as well. They had to be aware much earlier that the government of the country was ambiguous towards Europe on the one hand and it had no experience on the other. Therefore, they were also late. A month after the elections and the first unsuccessful meetings with the Greek side, they had to submit to Athens a list of very concrete proposals and to tell it that if it did not accept them Greece would go bankrupt. In this way, the matter would have ended much earlier.

How would you explain the isolation of Greece and the harder position of creditors? What are the dangers behind that?

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.

Do you think it probable?

No, because the government and especially the leaders of SYRIZA and Independent Greeks, Alexis Tsipras and Panos Kammenos, have been in power only for five months and have no reason to think even of their own long term interest. And this is that they should withdraw in this very difficult moment, allow technocrats to deal with it and return to power afterwards. Nor do they think about the national interest that lies in the need for consensus in this hard transitional period for Greece. Such a situation requires someone who can bear the political burden of implementing the reforms.

What would happen if no agreement were reached?

Within a few weeks, there would be capital controls, including on the money that somebody would want to take out of the country and on ATMs, and after a few weeks, a return to the so-called "new drachma".

In such a situation, "the time of the memorandum" would be considered the time of the good life for Greeks.

Is Grexit possible?

Of course it is possible and most likely it would happen because of the Greek government, if it continued to make the wrong moves that I mentioned earlier.

Since the beginning of the crisis, what mistakes have the Greek government and creditors made?

Both have made the same mistake and the Greek governments themselves made another one. The common mistake is the excessive emphasis on the increase of taxes and the dramatic wage cuts in a very short period of time while there is no emphasis on carrying out the structural reforms that should have started long ago.

The mistake of Greek governments is that, between 2010 and 2014, they did not take due account of the need for reforms. They were constantly trying to play what we call "catenaccio" in football. They tried to take piecemeal measures, thinking the problem would disappear in this way. No government seriously considered the option of winning political legitimacy and even of being re-elected if it had taken another path. Certainly, the measures would have been painful because we are talking about how the state intervenes in the economy, but six years later, we would have not been in the current situation.

How would you comment on the discrepancies in the information on negotiations submitted by the Greek government and creditors?

I think the same thing happens in all communist parties: the central committee states one thing before its members and they in turn tell the party members something totally different. The dual language is characteristic of the ruling party.

On the other hand, it is a problem that affects the entire Greek political system because previous governments were telling citizens one thing, stating something else abroad. It is part of the Greek political culture.