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European hardliners led by Germany damped expectations that a deal with Greece was at hand, questioning whether the government in Athens could be trusted to keep its word in exchange for a euro 74-billion ($83 billion) bailout.
Greece's proposal "is not good enough yet", Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem told reporters on Saturday, as he arrived for emergency consultations with his euro area colleagues in Brussels. What's more, the failure to implement earlier agreements "is still a big concern", he said.
Read more from our special coverage on "GREECE CRISIS"
The wall of scepticism came hours after Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras won overwhelming support in Parliament for a package of spending cuts, pension savings and tax increases that would clinch the country's third bailout since 2010. The finance ministers' talks will be followed by a summit scheduled for Sunday, the deadline for a new agreement.
Officials from creditor institutions gave the proposals a cautious welcome, with International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde foreseeing "a lot more progress". German scepticism might yet overshadow that prospect.
"We're going to have extraordinarily difficult negotiations," German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said upon his arrival. "Hope built over years on Greece until the end of last year was destroyed at an unimaginable level up until the last days and hours."
Showdown prelude
In a prelude to the Brussels showdown, Tsipras won a majority of 251 votes in the 300-seat parliament for his bailout proposals, but at a cost: More than a dozen members of his Syriza party refused to back the plan, with some denouncing the harsh austerity measures it prescribed less than a week after Tsipras won an anti-austerity referendum. After the vote, the prime minister said his priority would be to complete negotiations with creditors on a bailout deal.
"While the vote provides Tsipras with a strong mandate to reach a deal, it also raises significant questions about his grip on his party and potentially complicates the implementation of a possible new bailout programme," Wolfango Piccoli, managing director of Teneo Intelligence, wrote in a note to clients.
Earlier, the country's three creditor institutions - the IMF, the European Commission and the European Central Bank -assessed the programme positively as a basis for the bailout, according to a euro area official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
An agreement was possible but not certain, Tsipras told lawmakers, as the debate began in the early hours of Saturday.
"The institutions have analysed the Greek proposals and we have jointly decided they constitute a basis for negotiating a new financial assistance programme," European Union Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner Pierre Moscovici told reporters in Brussels.
Greece's international creditors still viewed the country's reform proposals as insufficient to meet budget surplus targets, Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung said, citing an assessment paper provided to euro area finance ministers.
"Can the Greek government be trusted to act, do what they are promising, to actually implement in the coming months and years?" Dijsselbloem said. "I think those are the key issues."
Strikingly similar
Greece's reform proposals are strikingly similar to the ones Greek voters overwhelmingly rejected at a referendum earlier this week. Greece is asking for three-year loans of at least euro 53.5 billion ($59.9 billion) to cover its financing needs between 2015 and 2018. It is also seeking debt restructuring and reprofiling of its long-term debt due after 2022. The earlier proposals were in return for a five-month extension of an existing bailout programme for loans of as much euro 15.5 billion and didn't involve any debt restructuring.
