By Pat Harrington – Debt-stricken Greece won a second bailout last night. European finance ministers awarded 130 billion Euros ($173 billion) in aid, engineered the central-bank profits transfer and pressured private investors into providing more debt relief in an exchange offer meant to tide Greece past a bond redemption on March 20. It is the biggest debt-restructuring in recent times.

The latest attempt to shore up the Euro and failing economies is likely to run into serious opposition. The Greek population is becoming increasingly alienated by the austerity measures demanded in return for the bailouts. Thirty per cent of civil servants are set to lose their jobs, the minimum wage is to be cut by twenty percent and suicides are up forty percent. Soup kitchens and rough sleepers are now a feature of life on Greek streets. In other parts of Europe many question the wisdom of throwing good money after bad in order to maintain the Euro.

A poll carried out by GPO on Feb 16-21, a week after lawmakers of the conservative New Democracy and the Socialist PASOK parties approved a harsh austerity package shows support for them declining. Backing for New Democracy stood at 19.4 percent and at 13.1 percent for PASOK. Both parties dropped about two percentage points from a previous GPO poll in December.

Vassilis Korkidis, head of the Greek Commerce Confederation said: "The new bailout is selling us time and hope at a very high price, while it doggedly continues to impose harsh austerity measures that keep us in a long and deep recession."

Speaking to NBC News Prof. Yanis Varoufakis an Economist at Athens University said: "Greece is bankrupt and all we're having is an assault on reason by the European Union trying to wrap it up and present it as something different. Greece is simply in denial and the Eurozone project is just as bankrupt as is Greece. We should default and accept the consequences."

Greece is still expected to have a debt in the region of 120% of GDP by 2020.

The assistance brings to at least 386 billion Euros the sums spent or committed to saving Greece, Ireland and Portugal from bankruptcy, and to prop-up the 13-year-old monetary union.

Nick Griffin, MEP, commented "Greece will avoid immediate bankruptcy and the Euro has been bought some more time. The price for this is, however, high. The Greek people will pay in cuts and other austerity measures. Northern European countries, with healthier economies will pay for the bailout. It is time to accept that the Euro in its present form is dying.

“We always said from the start that the plan to merge disparate economies under a single currency was flawed. Events continue to prove us right."