Alternate Minister of Finance, Christos Staikouras, is presenting the basic points of the new budget at 11 a.m. on Friday, prior to it being submitted to Greek Parliament at noon by Finance Minister Gikas Hardouvelis. The government plans for the budget to be voted on by December 7 despite the constant pressure by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) concerning the fiscal gap. The Finance Ministry believes that new cuts being called for are unnecessary as the budget foresees a primary surplus of 3% of the GDP for 2015 without new austerity measures.

As a precautionary measure, the new budget will transfer gains from 2014 to 2015 and will reduce the evaluation for a primary surplus for this year from 1.8% of the GDP to 1.5%.

The figures on which the 2015 budget is based are due to the optimistic estimations for a strong recovery of the Greek economy that is expected to have 2.9% growth for 2014 compared to the 0.6% GDP growth for this year.