Athens : Greece’s Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras on Thursday announced his resignation and has called an early election.
Tsipras made the announcement in a televised state address on Thursday.
He said with the first tranche of the bailout arriving, he now had the moral duty to ask the Greek people to deliver their judgment.
Tsipras, according to BBC, said he would seek the vote of the Greek people to continue his government’s programme.
Tsipras faced a rebellion within his ruling hard-left Syriza party over a new bailout deal which has been agreed with international creditors.
Greece received the first $14.5 billion tranche on Thursday, allowing it to repay a debt to the European Central Bank and avoid a messy default. But the austerity measures needed for the deal angered many in his party.
Tsipras said Greeks would have to decide whether he had represented them courageously with the creditors.
He will visit President Prokopis Pavlopoulos to submit his resignation.
Greece will then be run by a caretaker government.
Meanwhile, Macedonia said it has declared a ‘state of emergency’ on its southern border with Greece and would draft in the army to help control the influx of migrants crossing the frontier.
“Due to an increasing p ressure on the southern border….it is estimated that greater and more efficient control is needed in the region where illegal border crossings from the Greek side have been massively registered”, a government statement said.
By law, declaring a state of emergency allows for the ‘appropriate engagement of the army’.
The government said it expected that the involvement of the army to ‘increase security of the local population’ and to improve the handling of migrants crossing the border from Greece.
It did not say how many soldiers would be involved in border control.
The move came a day after Skopje said it was running out of trains to transport thousands of Syrian refugees heading towards the EU, describing the situation as ‘alarming’.
