Samaras says troika pulled plug on his government

Former conservative prime minister Antonis Samaras believes that the country's lenders pulled the plug on his government in late 2014 so as to prevent Greece from exiting the bailout agreements before Alexis Tsipras and SYRIZA came to power.

Speaking on the second day of the "50 Years of the Metapolitefsi" conference, Samaras, who was prime minister from 2012 to 2015, said that the lenders insisted that his government bridge a 900-million-euro fiscal gap in full knowledge that SYRIZA would win the next election.

He was responding to a question from Kathimerini Executive Editor Alexis Papachelas, who asked the former premier, "Do you have the feeling that at some point when SYRIZA was [going to win the next election] and our lenders maybe legitimately thought that this would happen, that they pulled the plug on you?"

"I'm convinced that it was certain that we...