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Despite the positive signals from Brussels that the creditors and Athens are close to agreeing on an extension of the memorandum, the International Monetary Fund today announced that the talks had been suspended and the members of the expert team were in Washington. Spokesman Jeffrey Rice stated that there were significant differences with the Greek government on many of the important issues and so far no progress had been made to overcome them.

The differences are mainly associated with VAT, the pension system and funding, as "figures should make sense," stated Rice. In his words, Director of International Monetary Fund Christine Lagarde "never leaves the negotiating table" and next week she will attend the meeting of the Eurogroup, which will discuss the Greek issue, adding that "the ball is now in the Greek field."

Following today's developments GRReporter presents the analysis of the difficult course of negotiations by Associate Professor in Political Science at the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at Athens University and a researcher at the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy Dimitris Sotiropoulos who talks with Anastasia Balezdrova.

Mr. Sotiropoulos, how would you comment on the hard line of Athens in the talks with the creditors?

Maintaining a hard line in any negotiations must be accompanied by concrete measures, such as economic ones. They in turn should be divided into measures that the country would not want to take, others that it could implement and a third group that it could accept after revising them.

The hard line itself leads to a stalemate namely because of the lack of such content and strategy. These measures should be included in a series of priorities. In the case of Athens, we see a position that shows the lack of strategy. It is clear from the protracted negotiations between the government and creditors as well as from the reactive, not proactive, position of the Greek government.

Therefore, maintaining a hard line that has no specific content makes no sense.

What is the major problem in the course of negotiations?

There were some consecutive problems and the majority of them were due to Greece.

The first was that the Greek government decided that its election victory was enough for it to start a "crusade" to change all economy-related policies in Europe, if not the decision-making processes on economic policies in the euro zone. It was a big mistake because no country, especially a small one, could consider itself a herald of new ideas.

The second strategic mistake of the Greek side was its assessment that it could buy time and that the protracting of negotiations could drive creditors to gradually move closer to its positions. The creditors, however, had no reason to hurry because not they needed funding but Greece.

The third mistake was that the Greek side was not aware of the intentions of the creditors to continue the bailout programmes. They were fairly "transparent" but I do not think that the representatives of the Greek government understood them. In addition, they were not familiar with how negotiations took place in the European bodies. They do not hold political discussions except in the lobbies in Brussels and Strasbourg or in private conversations between leaders during meetings such as the summits or in the Eurogroup. Each side there presents very concrete proposals. And before submitting them, it has attempted to form unions, but again on very specific things, for example, specific economic measures that are programmed in terms of time of application and that are calculated in advance. Greece, however, appeared both in informal and formal discussions to present only political ideas. They were not sufficient and proved that one could not achieve many things only with political debates.

The next mistake that could prove fatal was that the Greek side had no expertise. The party that won the elections in January anyway has an ambiguous attitude to the European Union. In the past, its predecessor Synaspismos often voted against it in ratifying the European treaties in the Greek parliament. However, SYRIZA claims it wants Greece to remain a member of the European Union. Its coalition partner, Independent Greeks, however, is openly an anti-European party.

Therefore, from the beginning, we had a government that did not know what it wanted to do with regard to Europe and that was not familiar with the technical details of the negotiations.

The European Commission, the International Monetary Fund and the Governing Council of the European Central Bank made mistakes as well. They had to be aware much earlier that the government of the country was ambiguous towards Europe on the one hand and it had no experience on the other. Therefore, they were also late. A month after the elections and the first unsuccessful meetings with the Greek side, they had to submit to Athens a list of very concrete proposals and to tell it that if it did not accept them Greece would go bankrupt. In this way, the matter would have ended much earlier.

How would you explain the isolation of Greece and the harder position of creditors? What are the dangers behind that?