Prime minister could face a confidence vote next week as he falls short of 120 votes he needs to survive a censure motion

After a tumultuous, often ill-tempered and at times surreal all-night debate, Greek MPs voted early on Friday to approve a new multibillion euro bailout deal aimed at keeping their debt-stricken country afloat.

Greek bailout vote and eurozone GDP growth figures - live updates Read more

But a fierce rebellion in the ranks of his leftist Syriza party saw prime minister Alexis Tsipras fall short of the 120 votes he would need to survive a censure motion, leading to speculation he would call a confidence vote next week and snap elections as early as next month.

More than 40 Syriza hardliners, including controversial former finance minister Yannis Varoufakis, failed to toe the party line, angry at the punishing terms of the €85bn (£60bn) package and what they said was a sell-out of the party’s principles and a betrayal of its promises.

Tsipras needed the support of opposition parties after the marathon session to win parliament’s backing for the bill in a 9.45am vote, which the government eventually won by a comfortable margin of 222 votes to 64, with 11 abstentions.

The prime minister told MPs before the vote that the rescue package was a “necessary choice” for the nation, saying it faced a battle to avert the threat of a bridge loan - which he called a return to a “crisis without end” - that Greece may be offered instead of a full-blown bailout.

The draft bailout must now be approved by other eurozone member states at a meeting of finance ministers in Brussels on Friday afternoon, and ratified by national parliaments in a number of countries – including Germany, which remains sceptical – before a first tranche can be disbursed allowing Greece to make a crucial €3.2bn payment to the European Central Bank due on 20 August.

The Athens parliament did not start debating the 400-page text of the draft bailout plan until nearly 4am after parliamentary speaker Zoe Konstantopoulou, a Syriza hardliner, ignored Tsipras’s request to speed up proceedings and instead raised a lengthy series of procedural questions and objections.

In angry exchanges, the conservative opposition rounded on the government, warning it not to take its support for granted. “If you want to provoke us - and for us to vote for it - you can’t have it both ways,” New Democracy leader Vangelis Meimarakis told finance minister Euclid Tsakalotos.

On the left, former energy minister Panagiotis Lafazanis, who leads a rebel bloc of around a quarter of Syriza’s 149 MPs, pledged to “smash the eurozone dictatorship”, while in her concluding pre-vote remarks, Konstantopoulou announced: “I am not going to support the prime minister any more.”

Earlier, the government spokeswoman, Olga Gerovasili, had conceded that divisions within the leftist party, which swept to victory in January’s elections on a staunch anti-austerity platform, were now so deep that a formal split was probably inevitable.

Germany, the biggest single contributor to Greece’s two previous bailouts, cautioned on Wednesday that eurozone support for the package – which includes more tough spending cuts and tax hikes and surrenders unprecedented powers over large areas of Greek economic and social policymaking to the country’s international creditors – was not yet guaranteed.



“Germany isn’t the only country that is still asking questions at the moment,” deputy finance minister Jens Spahn said, pointing in particular to the issues of International Monetary Fund support for the deal and concerns about a planned privatisation fund to sell off Greek state-owned property.



Germany has repeatedly signalled it might prefer to back a bridging loan to help Greece meet its ECB payment rather than agree to an imperfect longer-term deal that might not work – a solution Athens is unwilling to accept.

It emerged overnight, however, that senior EU finance officials had asked the European Commission to draw up a “contingency plan” for a new interim loan as a safety net to buy more time for eurozone members to finalise the plan.

The debate followed better-than-expected Greek economic growth figures, with official estimates on Thursday showing the economy had expanded by 0.8% in the second quarter of 2015 despite the imposition of capital controls to prevent a bank run. The national statistics agency, ELSTAT, also revised upwards its first-quarter growth estimate, from a 0.2% contraction to zero growth.

But Greece’s European creditors on Thursday also underlined the temporary nature of the country’s surprise return to growth, warning they have “serious concerns” about the spiralling debts of the eurozone’s weakest member.

According to an analysis completed by the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the eurozone bailout fund, Greece’s debts will peak at 201% of its national output (GDP) in 2016.