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After five months of negotiations, a bank holiday and a referendum, the government is optimistic that on 18 August the new agreement will hit parliament. Anyway, there are only two weeks left for this hope to materialise or flop.

According to the timetable adopted at the 12 July summit, the new bailout package must be voted in parliament on 18 August.

"Don't count the remaining days, count the hours, and there are only 360 of them left," says a government minister who is closely following the negotiation process. He pointed out that consultations are underway day and night.

The quartet's pressure

Governmental sources close to the negotiations neither confirm nor deny reports of austerity measures demanded by the creditors' quartet (or Quadriga, as Juncker calls it). They are not talking about a battle either, instead presenting a softer image of a 'discussion with equal arguments' and optimistically predicting that in the end 'the worst will be avoided.'

For example, the new minister of energy (the one replacing Panagiotis Lafazanis), Panos Skourletis, says that creditors at this stage accept that privatisation be asterisked and alternatives mooted instead, with the government submitting them within a matter of days.

The talk of 72 years as retirement age is considered 'ridiculous', but at the same time the scrapping of early retirement is not denied (even from 1 July).

Tsipras himself gave it a fairly positive air in a recent interview (some practical issues are being discussed, such as what will happen to those who are eligible for early retirement under the existing arrangements and have already quit their jobs to apply for a pension, or how to handle the army and navy).

On the taxation of farmers – a hot issue not only for the government, but for the opposition as well – the cabinet insists on eking out the new measures over the next two years, rather than apply them immediately. The "new system of taxation has to be phased in", is what they say.

There are other contentious issues, e.g. changes in employment demanded by the creditors: collective redundancies, a new minimum wage (at a time when the government has committed itself to a return to the minimum wage before the memorandum), as well as changes in trade union laws, especially the ways of making a decision to strike.

As far as the public sector is concerned, the elephant in the room is the changes in the special salaries. According to the same sources, other points to be discussed are the immediate dismissals of convicted civil servants through speeding up disciplinary proceedings and harking back to performance assessments for teachers.

OECD instruments and reforming the commodity exchange are also among the subjects for discussion, with the pair Stathakis-Tsakalotos having made serious headway on these since April. The opening of professions (e.g. engineers, notaries, etc.) is not regarded as a hot issue for the time being.

Elections in the cold

The political question is how the agreement will get through parliament. This is what the cabinet replies: just as the measures went through. They believe that 30-32 SYRIZA MPs are certain to vote against.

The PM is unlikely to use that ballot as a vote of confidence as this would carry a risk of immediate elections in early September if the 'Lafazanians' vote against.

"There are different opinions about the timing of the election, but most likely it will already be cold," said a government source. As he explains, "elections are pointless unless we have an agreement on the debt." But the latter must wait until the October assessment.

No special purpose government

The cabinet is not discussing a new government with special functions or a national unity government to include representatives of New Democracy, PASOK and Potami.

"We will not betray the people, they rejected the representatives of the bankrupt political system, which are again trying to come up on stage through the back door," said the government representative, Olga Gerovasili.

Unlike her, Dora Bakoyannis insists on a government 'of national unity', with or without elections.