ATHENS-A fresh wave of an­ti-aus­ter­i­ty strikes hit Greece yes­ter­day as the lead­ers of the gov­ern­ing coali­tion re­mained un­able to fi­nalise fur­ther spend­ing cuts for the com­ing two years with­out which the coun­try will lose its vi­tal res­cue loans. State hos­pi­tal doc­tors, school teach­ers and lo­cal au­thor­i­ty em­ploy­ees walked off the job yes­ter­day to protest planned salary and fund­ing cuts un­der a new &eu­ro;11.5 bil­lion ($14.7 bil­lion) aus­ter­i­ty pack­age.

The three unions held a peace­ful march to the Fi­nance Min­istry in cen­tral Athens car­ry­ing ban­ners read­ing "No to the fi­nan­cial col­lapse of lo­cal au­thor­i­ties" and "We will not pay for the cri­sis, we did not cre­ate it." Among the 3,000-strong crowd were sev­er­al may­ors, in­clud­ing the cap­i­tal's Gior­gos Kamin­is. Lat­er yes­ter­day, about 1,500 re­tired and serv­ing mil­i­tary of­fi­cers, with many in uni­form, marched to the Fi­nance Min­istry to protest a planned new round of salary cuts.

Debt-crip­pled Greece has de­pend­ed since May 2010 on in­ter­na­tion­al res­cue loans, grant­ed by its Eu­ro­pean part­ners and the In­ter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund, in re­turn for a deeply-un­pop­u­lar aus­ter­i­ty pro­gramme. In ad­di­tion to the pre­vi­ous cut­backs, Athens must now de­cide how to cut a fur­ther &eu­ro;11.5 bil­lion as de­mand­ed by the coun­try's cred­i­tors.

Con­ser­v­a­tive Prime Min­is­ter An­to­nis Sama­ras is fight­ing an up­hill strug­gle on two fronts. As well as get­ting the sup­port of his cen­tre-left coali­tion part­ners, he has to get the ap­proval of debt in­spec­tors from the Eu­ro­pean Union, the IMF and Eu­ro­pean Cen­tral Bank, the so-called troi­ka. So far, Sama­ras hasn't man­aged to get his coali­tion part­ners to sign off on the pro­posed mea­sures. Sama­ras met with the heads of the So­cial­ist PA­SOK and De­mo­c­ra­t­ic Left par­ties yes­ter­day evening, but a fi­nal agree­ment elud­ed them.

AP