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Next week, the so-called "The Troika"...the IMF, ECB and EU...will announce at least 5 years of bitter austerity pills for Greeks to swallow...just to get another $17bn tranche of a previous bail-out.
Many Greeks see any new measures...as more bad medicine...that only pushes the nation deeper into a "debt trap."
"So next time they will loan us more money to save us from the previous debts and make sure that we accumulate even more debt," says a citizen.
"If this is a rescue plan, I don't want to be rescued. But I want to be rescued with a different plan," said an opposition party adviser. That party wants to renegotiate the terms imposed by the troika. "We should not implement heavy taxes on an economy that's been already in deep recession. That is exactly what happened and it didn't work."
ALSO: ANALYSIS / OPINION by Gavin Hewitt:
"There is an air of desperation in Brussels. For a year they have thrown everything at resolving Europe's debt crisis but still it persists. They have re-written their own rule book, committed hundreds of billions in loans, given birth to new mechanisms. And yet it has not gone away.
Greece stubbornly stands in the way. Next Tuesday, the Greek parliament must vote on a raft of austerity measures. If the MPs were to reject the new round of cuts, we would have reached a defining moment for the single currency."
Yet many believe this is a game of bluff.
The EU insists that backing the austerity plan is a condition for fresh loans and without a new tranche of money Greece would be heading for a default. Yesterday the head of the Eurogroup, Jean-Claude Juncker, insisted there was "no plan B".
