As agreed by the Eurosummit of 12 July, Greece was obliged to pass two packages of legislation conditional to reopening bailout talks with its international creditors over the summer. The first was passed last Wednesday, 15 July, with the second set to be put to a vote this Wednesday, 22 July. The draft bill, according to Vouliwatch, is 977 pages long and was received late on Monday by MPs for review – quite a feat for even the speediest of speed readers.

The Eurosummit statement describes this package of legislation as follows:

  • the adoption of the Code of Civil Procedure, which is a major overhaul of procedures and arrangements for the civil justice system and can significantly accelerate the judicial process and reduce costs 
  •  the transposition of the BRRD with support from the European Commission.

This sounds innocuous enough. Former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, who voted against the first package of legislation and has annotated the agreement on his blog, opines that the Code of Civil Procedure bill will in practice mean “foreclosures, evictions and liquidation of thousands of homes and businesses who are not in a position to keep up with their mortgages/loans.”
 
The BRRD, or the Bank Recovery and Resolution Directive is an EU Directive that applies in all EU member states to deal with banking crisis and aims to ensure that it will be ‘the bank's shareholders and their creditors who will bear the related costs and losses of a failure rather than the taxpayer.’ If recapitalisation needs cannot be covered by private investors, then deposits of €100,000 will be at risk of contributing to a ‘bail-in’.
 
Maybe not quite so innocuous after all then, but who’d have the time to read it anyway…?

The Speaker of the Parliament, Zoe Konstantopoulou, today commented on the tight deadline,

“The deadlines that have been set for the MP’s in order to vote for the realization of the ‘prior action’ deal are so narrow that they cannot study the legislation that they are expected to vote for, nor do they have the chance to deliberate and argue on them.” She continued, stating that “This is a coup which should make us think about our responsibilities, we should not allow it to succeed because it will then be repeated and it will become the rule in both in Europe and further.”

While Ms Konstantopoulou did not support the government in last Wednesday's vote, registering as 'present', she has opted not to resign her position. She continues to head up the parliament even as she describes it as the subject of a coup.