‘No’ camp heads for resounding win in Greek referendum

ATHENS: Over 60 percent of Greeks on Sunday rejected further austerity dictated by the country’s EU-IMF creditors in a referendum, results from 50 percent of polling stations showed.
The ‘No’ vote was expected to exceed 61 percent, said Michalis Kariotoglou, head of Singular Logic, the IT company overseeing the referendum results. In Athens hundreds of ‘No’ voters began celebrating Sunday after early results showed those who rejected further austerity measures in a crucial bailout referendum were poised to win.
Chanting slogans, waving Greek flags and holding aloft ‘No’ placards, celebrators flocked to the city’s Syntagma square and gathered in front of parliament to cry victory, an AFP journalist said.
It remained to be seen, however, how European leaders and institutions would view the likely result — and whether it would trigger “Grexit”, or Greece’s exit from the eurozone, as some had warned.
Senior eurozone officials were to hold talks on Monday, a European source told AFP, without elaborating.France’s President Francois Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel were also to meet in Paris the same day to discuss the result of the referendum, the French presidency said.
Early official figures, based on nearly 50 percent of ballots counted, showed 60 percent of votes in favour of a government’s ‘No’ to tough austerity conditions that had been attached to a bailout deal that expired last Tuesday. Forty 40 percent had voted for ‘Yes’.
The interior ministry said turnout was over 50 percent.“With this result, the prime minister has a clear mandate from the Greek people,” government spokesman Gabriel Sakellaridis said on television. “Initiatives will intensify from this evening (Sunday) onward so that there can be a deal” on a new bailout, he said.
He added that the Bank of Greece was immediately asking the European Central Bank to inject emergency euro cash for Greece’s depleted banks, which have been shuttered all week because of capital controls.
Defence Minister Panos Kammenos, who also leads the junior coalition party in Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’s leftwing government, said in a tweet that the Greeks “proved they don’t bow to blackmail, to threats”.