Greek protests hit by violent clashes
The violence lasted about 30 minutes when scores of youths hurled rocks, paint and plastic bottles near parliament and officers responded by firing tear gas.
Windows were smashed at the Finance Ministry, which has been accused by the European Union of slipshod statistics-keeping that made the financial crisis worse.
The day’s protests were otherwise peaceful. Unions organised the march amid a 24-hour strike that grounded flights, shut schools and crippled public services.
Greece is considering tougher measures to ward off a financial crisis that has undermined the euro and raised fears that financial market contagion will spread to other weak economies such as Portugal, Spain and Italy.
The European Union has issued a vague promise to support Greece, which has €53 billion of debts coming due this year, but the government of Prime Minister George Papandreou has pressed for more specific guarantees to shore up market confidence.
The government says it will not need a bailout and will stick to its plans to make sharp cutbacks.
There was disruption elsewhere in Europe by workers unsettled by the threat to their jobs from the slow economy and government plans to cut back.
In France, a strike by air traffic controllers disrupted flights for a second day. And in Spain, tens of thousands of demonstrators rallied in several cities to protest over a government proposalto raise the retirementage by two years to 67.
Greece has already imposed broad spending cuts but says it is under pressure from the EU to cut salaries in the civil service, traditionally looked to as a jobs provider.
Officials from the EU and International Monetary Fund are in Athens to inspect public finances, ahead of a March 16 deadline to show signs of fiscal improvement or face imposed additional austerity measures.
Unions say cutting Greeks’ so-called 14th salary – part of annual pay held back as a holiday bonus – for public workers would be taken as “an act of war”.
The country’s two largest unions, the private sector GSEE and public sector ADEDY, fiercely oppose a wave of belt-tightening measures announced over the past weeks to reduce the budget deficit from 12.7% of gross domestic product to 8.7% this year.
“If all these measures are enforced, unemployment will skyrocket. Our country will enter a massive recession and unemployment will reach a Europe-wide record,” a GSEE spokesman said. “This will be tragic because it will provoke social (unrest) and clashes.”
Greek unemployment hit a five-year high of 10.6% in November 2009, up from 9.8% in October. The country’s woes have affected confidence in the euro as a common currency, and raised its borrowing costs.
