After Surviving Vote, Papandreou Seeks to Shore Up Aid

Fresh from winning a confidence, Prime Minister George Papandreou will attempt to shore up support for an international rescue after Greece’s main opposition party rejected his offer to try and form a new government.

At midday, Papandreou has scheduled to meet with President Karlos Papoulias to discuss his plans for a unity government after patching up a rift within his ruling Pasok party by offering to step down.

”We have to agree on common goals for a timetable and program even for the head of this government,” Papandrou told the lawmakers in the very early hours of this morning before winning his second confidence motion in six months. ”The scale of the task facing Greece exceeds the abilities of any one party.”

Papandreou’s offers tops of a tumultuous week that started with him securing him a second bailout from the European Union then roiling markets by one-sidely deciding to put the terms of that rescue to the Greek people in a vote. In order to secure agreement on the aid package before Greece runs out of funds next month, the premier must heal political divisions.

”Papandrou, by bringing things to a head, has basically, without expecting this to happen, sacrificed his own political career,” Sassan Ghahramani, who is the chief executive officer of SGH Marco Advisors, said on the Bloomberg’s Television show ”Street Smart.” ”The price for that has been that the opposition party is now willing to cooperate with a transitional government if it comes into place and show a more united front towards the EU and IMF.”

In the 300-memeber parliament voting, Papandreou won with 153 votes to 145, says Parliament Speaker Filippos Petsalnikos, in remarks carried live on state-run Vouli TV today.

The euro fell before the confidence vote as a meeting of the world’s top 20 leaders ended without agreement on how to support the continent’s indebted nations, and European stocks extended the biggest weekly slide in six.

”The country risks losing it’s autonomy, its level of life and the international context is becoming more stifling every day,” Venizelos said. ”Society must a last be able to breathe and on Monday, the country must be represented in a credible and reliable way at the Eurogroup.”

”The masks have fallen,” says Antonis Samaras, who is the head of the New Democracy party, in an emailed statement from his Athens-based office today. ”Papandreou has rejected all of out proposals. The responsibility he bears is huge. The only solution is elections.”

”In the eyes of Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy he doesn’t have much credibility left,” says Jacob Kirkengaard, who is a research fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, in a Bloomberg TV interview. ”Greece needs to have a new face to the rest of the world.”