ATHENS—An anti-austerity demonstration by more than 80,000 people in Athens degenerated into violence Wednesday as hundreds of protesters clashed with riot police ahead of a crucial parliamentary vote on new spending cuts.

Greek lawmakers narrowly passed the austerity bill by majority vote early Thursday, but with heavy dissent from within the three-party governing coalition.

The vote was the toughest test yet for the country’s fragile four-month-old coalition government, which had to pass the 13.5 billion euros ($17 billion) package of measures to ensure Greece could continue receiving bailout loans from its international creditors and avoid bankruptcy.

Without the loans, Prime Minister Antonis Samaras had said Greece would run out of euros next week.

“Today we must confirm Greece’s new credibility,” Samaras said ahead of the vote. “We choose whether we want to stay in the eurozone . . . or return to the drachma. That is the choice.”

The measures will pile more pain on the Greeks, who have suffered wave after wave of spending cuts and tax hikes since their government revealed in 2009 that public debt was actually far higher than officially declared.

“Many of these measures are fair and should have been taken years ago, without anyone asking us to,” Samaras said.

“Others are unfair — cutting wages and salaries — and there is no point in dressing this up as something else,” he said, adding that the country was, however, obliged to take them.

On Wednesday, hundreds of rioters hurled rocks and gasoline bombs at lines of police guarding Parliament, who responded with volleys of tear gas and stun grenades, and the first use of water cannon in Greece in years.

Some in the 80,000-strong demonstration, which braved sometimes torrential rain, ran for cover as running battles broke out with police on the second day of a 48-hour general strike. Clouds of tear gas rose from Syntagma Square.

Immediately after the vote and before the tally had been officially announced, two of the coalition parties expelled a total of seven dissenting deputies from their ranks.

The third party in the coalition, the small Democratic Left, mostly voted “present” — in essence abstaining from the vote.

Greece’s next bailout loan installment of $40 billion, out of a total of $305 billion, is already five months overdue.

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