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One percent will be Greece's budget deficit in 2015, vowed the Minister of Finance Georgios Papakonstantinou in Parliament, who tried to protect the consistency of the medium-term recovery program. His message was that now is the time for cooperation and unanimity - two things that are not yet seen among the political forces of Greece. "It is time for concrete proposals, not generalities. We are in a period of unnecessary easy criticisms," said the Greek Minister of Finance abruptly from the Parliament rostrum.

He urged all political forces to support the implementation of the medium term plan and stressed that the policy of the parliamentary opposition New Democracy should not be directed against the changes. He criticized the radical left SYRIZA, which accuses him that he wants to sell off the state. Papaconstantinou said that the operation of public property by private entrepreneurs is part of the program for the budget deficit reduction and it is not about selling, but granting temporary right of use.
 
Many of the economic experts in Greece assessed as surprising the conviction with which Papakonstantinou talked about the budget deficit zeroing. Especially after the last year’s success of the government to reduce it to 9.5% of the GDP (from 15.4% of the GDP in 2009) proved to be failure and the delay in revenue collection opened three billion euros hole in the recovery program. Eurostat must come up with the final estimation of the size of the Greek budget deficit for 2010 on the 24^th of April, this year, but it seems that it will reach whole 10.6% of the GDP.

And while the government representatives are trying to convince the people and the opposition that Greece is on the right track, rumours of debt restructuring are gaining force. Financial guru George Soros also believes that Greece will not get away with some kind of restructuring of the accumulated debts. He met with the Prime Minister of Greece George Papandreou and the Minister of Finance Georgios Papakonstantinou this week and they discussed the global economic development, the financial problems of the country and the Euro zone as a whole, and the crisis in the Mediterranean region, reported Imerisia.

According to the scant information in the Greek press, Soros has stated that it is important to activate the reform in the banking sector to be able to withstand the increasing pressure from the foreign markets. Greece must seek strategic partnership with more stable foreign institutions, which will help the country to emerge from the swamp of recession more rapidly. He said that the efforts of the government are extremely serious, but it is still too early for congratulations. The same said Georgios Papakonstantinou, who recognized for the first time that the country has not passed half the way to the exit of the crisis yet, no matter what has been done so far.

Meanwhile, the German edition of the Financial Times published information that some of the member states of the union considered a real possibility of the Greek foreign debt haircut. The paper referred to senior representatives from the euro area without mentioning their names and comments on that such a scenario is not excluded, because no one believes that Greece could enter the capital markets in 2012. Such a development will drag feet on debt restructuring of other troubled countries such as Ireland and Portugal, estimated the economic analysts.