WORLD
Greek cabinet set for first meeting since poll upset
Baku, January 28, AZERTAC
Greece's new radical left-led government prepared to meet Wednesday for the first time to hammer out a strategy for renegotiating the country's giant bailout, after storming to power on a promise to reject years of harsh austerity policies.
The coalition cabinet, made up of poll winners Syriza and the nationalist Independent Greeks (ANEL), was set to convene at 10:30 am (0830 GMT), three days after Sunday's electoral upset that saw the architects of Greece's sweeping budget cutbacks thrown out of office.
In a sign that the new government will take a hard line in haggling over the 240-billion-euro ($269 billion) EU-IMF package with international creditors, 40-year-old Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras on Tuesday named leftwing economist Yanis Varoufakis as finance minister.
A polyglot academic, 53-year-old Varoufakis, is a vocal critic of the conditions imposed by creditors in return for the 2010 bailout and he argues the country's shattered economy will never recover until they are relaxed.
Analysts have described Syriza's coalition with ANEL as "unnatural" and potentially short-lived, saying that the smaller party is unpredictable and that the two parties differ starkly on immigration policy.
However, the allies -- who together have 162 seats in the 300-member parliament -- share a common opposition to the EU-IMF bailout.
Among their first tasks will be addressing an end-of-February deadline set by the EU for Greece to carry out more reforms in return for a seven-billion-euro tranche of financial aid from the 28-member bloc and the International Monetary Fund.
Tsipras, who has vowed to reverse many of the severe spending cuts and other measures that Greece's creditors insist on, must decide whether to prolong the deadline.