Former PM and leader of the Democrat Socialists Movement George Papandreou defends his decision to sign the memorandum with international lenders saying it saved the country from a financial collapse and insists that Europe ‘didn’t support us’

The leader of  the Democrat Socialists Movement, George Papandreou, who has been widely demonized for signing the Greek bailout agreement with the country’s troika of lenders, hit back this week saying that without ‘this medicine’ to cure the causes of the crisis, the country would have collapsed and accused the previous government of  handing him a ‘hot potato’.

“΅We received a hot potato in 2009 and we tried to manage, without any help from anyone,” he said in an interview to Skai TV on Wednesay, adding that EU did not take him seriously when he told them that Greek statistics regarding the economy were false.
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“I went to our partners in 2009 and I told them about the fraud regarding Greek statistics and they laughed…In the beginning they agreed there would be no cuts to wages and pensions but then we were hit by the markets and then came the conservative neoliberal policies, he said.

“Europe didn’t support us, one prime minister said ‘let Greece go bankrupt’ and I gave him the appropriate answer,” Papandreou explained, regarding events at the fateful meeting in Cannes in 2011 when German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the then French President Nicolas Sarkozy forced him to take back his decision to hold a referendum on the Greek bailout.

He said the memorandum and the harsh austerity policies it ushered was a result of bad policies of previous governments.

“The memorandum was brought by policies and things we did or did not do..I was going around like a  beggar asking for support from different countries. But  I never said  ‘corrupt country (Greece)’” he said.

He added that if Greece had a fair taxation system the burdens of the crisis would have been carried more evenly.

Papandreou justified his decision to form the Democrat Socialists Movement, because the party he once led, Pasok, had ‘identified itself with the harshest manifestation of the harshest policies”.