Oh, and here’s a photo of Alexis Tsipras voting tonight (note the now-traditional lack of a tie)

Greek government ministers look pleased to have got this confidence vote out of the way.

It’s a wrap.

Sounds like every member of the Greek government backed it tonight -- just as well, really, given they were only sworn in two weeks ago.

The result is coming in too...

Helena’s verdict is in:

Next, the vote of confidence. This shouldn’t be a problem for the government, as it holds 162 of the 300 seats.

That could be tricky to pull off....

The Greek PM is also pledging to meet all his pre-election promises; not leaving much wriggle-room.

Tsipras is now urging Greek people to support him, saying Athens can’t be blackmailed by Europe while they are by his side.

As we flagged up earlier today, Greece’s government insists it is receiving support from America’s government.

Tsipras says that Greece will seek a deal, to allow it to fulfill its debt obligations and allow it to repair its economy and return to growth.

Onto specifics, and Tsipras confirms that his government will seek a short-term arrangement, to give them time and space to agree a longer deal.

No obvious self-doubt in Tsipras’s speech:

Hard to argue with this one:

Hard to argue...

Tsipras warns that the Europe of democracy and solidarity, values and people, could give way to a Europe of “terror, division & destabilization”, if the wrong decisions are taken.

Tsipras is hammering home that Europe has reached a historic point (one of many in the crisis). The decisions taken in the coming days will determine whether Europe can remain united, he says.

The election on 25 January marked the end of a political regime, Tsipras says.

Tsipras: It won’t simply be Yanis Varoufakis at the eurogroup meeting on Wednesday night, but 10 million Greeks, including poor people and neo-immigrants.

Time for the new PM.....

Samaras ends his speech saying: “There’s something worse than a kolotumba (u-turn) - and that’s taking the country to the rocks [of disaster]”

Not sure that Samaras is winning many votes....

Greece’s previous prime minister, Antonis Samaras, is now addressing the chamber, warning that the crisis could explode:

And in a remarkable bare-faced move, Samaras is now lecturing prime minister Tsipras for not (yet) asking for a longer bailout extension -- something *he* turned down in December. Impressive, in its own way.

Hello again. The Greek confidence debate is heading towards a vote.

While we were offline... the economy minister promise that the ERT station would reopen soon, having been forcibly shut in 2013.

And also promised more protection for householders facing eviction

PS: The confidence vote result is due after midnight Athens time (after 10pm GMT), so the blog will burst back into life at some point.

The debate is continuing in Athens, with the head of the health ministry laying out plans to strengthen the service.

Diane has it covered:

Here’s Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis telling the Athens parliament that Greece’s post-bailout era starts tonight.

Varoufakis also said that 30% of the austerity programme is “toxic”, and declared:

“If you’re not willing to even consider a clash, you’re not negotiating.”

“We’re not seeking a clash. We will do everything to avoid it. But you’re not negotiating if you’ve ruled it out.”

Not sure if this is a good omen, or not, but it’s snowing in Athens tonight.

The head of Greece’s KKE communist party, Dimitris Koutsoubas, did not take up the invitation to support the new government.

Instead, Koutsoubas bluntly argued that the Greece government’s six-month ‘bridging programme’ is effectively a bailout extension (something Alexis Tsipras had ruled out on Sunday night).

Varoufakis concludes by repeating that he rejects around 30% of the existing austerity programme, and urges opposition MPs to support him in the eurogroup negotiations:

But will Greece walk out the same way?...

Varoufakis may be an expert in game theory, but he insists he’s not playing games in these negotiations:

Yanis Varoufakis rules out accepting any bailout terms that raise Greece’s debt levels:

Venizelos is also querying exactly what Yanis Varoufakis means when he says he only rejects 30% of the bailout programme:

Back in the Athens parliament, the former deputy prime minister is chiding the new government for not communicating its plans better.

Pasok leader Evangelos Venizelos (who experienced a few debt crisis meetings in his time) said MPs are being asked to support Alexis Tsipras without knowing what will be offered to the eurogroup.

Diane Shugart has the details:

Venizelos also cautions Tsipras against expecting too much:

Jasper Lawler, analyst at CMC Markets, sums up the too-ing and fro-ing in recent days:

Greek politicians are walking a tightrope of shouting condemnation of the previous bailout package loud enough that their voters can hear but also whispering compromises to EU bureaucrats to try and get a deal done.

In the meantime, markets are getting pushed around on every report that indicates a move towards or away from compromise by either side.

Greece’s finance ministry has come out with a statement tonight, denying a report that the government intends to go back on its decision to drop the privatisation of Pireaus port.

The Wall Street Journal had earlier cited a ministry official as saying the sale of Pireaus Port authority would go ahead.

Syriza has made it a cornerstone of its economic programme not to denationalise state assets as Panaghiotis Lafazanis, the country’s energy minister and head of the party’s militant Left Platform, emphasized earlier today (see 10.51am GMT)

Lafazanis came out with some hard talk today about privatisations being put on hold.

As mentioned earlier, Yanis Varoufakis takes a more moderate stance on the issue and has insisted that any privatisation that has already be embarked on will not be stopped (via Helena Smith).

There will also be demonstrations in support of Greece in other cities on Wednesday night, including in Germany, Italy and Portugal.

And next weekend, there will be a demo in Edinburgh on Saturday, and in London, Amsterdam and Brussels (among others) on Sunday.

There’s a full list here.

Heads-up. There will be pro-government demonstrations across Greece tomorrow night, to show the eurogroup that Alexis Tsipras’s government has their support.

Teneo Intelligence analyst Wolf Piccoli says Schäuble has punctured excessive expectations.

Reminder: the eurogroup of €-finance ministers also meets next Monday...

Back in the British Chambers of Commerce annual conference, deputy prime minister Nick Clegg has wheeled out Greece to defend the government’s record.

<cough> Except, of course, that Britain’s debt/GDP ratio was nowhere near Greece’s, and the Bank of England was prepared to swallow up government debt to keep borrowing costs down.

Now this is interesting... Officials in Brussels are apparently ‘infuriated’ by some of the claims being put around by Greece ahead of tomorrow night’s eurogroup meeting.

That’s via MNI:

The carefully orchestrated dance between the new Greek government and its European creditors appeared to crack Tuesday, with top Brussels officials infuriated by what they see as wildly misleading claims coming from Athens.

Apparent claims from Athens officials to other governments suggesting that the U.S. Treasury supports a plan by the Syriza-led government to alleviate Greece’s debt, and that the European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker either backed the plan or had an alternative himself, have enraged senior economy officials in Brussels.

A senior European official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, described the situation as “berserk” and said, “there is no plan.”

He added that the European Commission and U.S. Treasury were both perturbed at the way they had apparently been represented externally by Greek officials. A team from the U.S. Treasury led by Daleep Singh, deputy assistant secretary for Europe & Eurasia, was in Athens late last week.

“The Greeks are digging their own graves,” the EU official said.

#developing....

The US stock market has opened higher, on optimism that Greece and its creditors are moving towards a deal.

The Dow Jones index is up by 80 points, or around 0.5%, in early trading.

We shouldn’t forget that the European Commission had originally proposed a six-month bailout extension late last year.

Instead, former PM Antonis Samaras took a two-month window. That gamble failed after MPs rejected his candidate for the presidency, triggering the election won by Syriza.

The German chancellor Angela Merkel’s lightning visit to Washington yesterday is being seen as playing a big role in getting Berlin to “see sense,” analysts and officials are telling our correspondent Helena Smith in Athens.

US president Barack Obama said he was looking forward to hearing how Merkel foresaw kickstarting growth in Greece, after the two leaders held talks on Monday.

“I look forward to hearing Angela’s assessment of how Europe and the IMF can work with the new Greek government to find a way that returns Greece to sustainable growth within the euro zone,” he told a news conference underling how critical such growth was to the global economy and the United States.

“Geopolitically Greece is very important,” the former foreign minister Dora Bakoyannis told Helena in parliament where she was attending the debate ahead of tonight’s confidence vote.

“The situation in the Ukraine and with ISIS is very very serious …. I don’t think any of our partners in Europe wants to see catastrophe in Greece.”

Janis Emmanouilidis, director of studies at the European Policy Centre in Brussels, is optimistic.

Heads-up: the Greek PM might be chatting to the head of the European commission shortly. Another sign of a deal coming?

The Greek stock market is rallying on the back of MNI’s report that the EC will offer Greece a six-month extension.

The main index is up almost 3.5%. Bond yields continue to recover too.

A breakthrough between Greece and the rest of the eurozone is more likely to come at next Monday’s eurogroup meeting, rather than tomorrow night’s emergency gathering.

Greek bond yields are still falling today, on hopes of a compromise deal being agreed.

But as this chart shows, they’re still much higher than before the current crisis began.

Newsflash from Brussels – the European commission isn’t confident of a big breakthrough this week:

Ed Balls, Labour’s shadow chancellor, has told the British Chambers of Commerce annual conference in London that eurozone leaders have serious issues to tackle (but he didn’t speak specifically about Greece).

Peter Spiegel of the Financial Times has written a (typically) excellent Q&A on the Greek crisis.

In it, he explains that European officials are worried that Greece could run out of money in March, rather than cling on until the summer.

That’s because Greek tax revenues are thought to have fallen sharply amid the political upheaval, leaving it short of cash for an IMF loan repayment.

With no way to raise cash on the capital markets, and no bailout financing in place, Athens could literally go bust. A developed country defaulting on an IMF payment would be unprecedented.

That’s exactly why Athens wants a bridging loan, but there’s a problem...

This would seem an obvious and simple solution, but no such thing exists in the eurozone arsenal. The European Stability Mechanism, the eurozone’s new €500bn bailout fund, can fund full-scale bailouts, bank recapitalisation programmes and even purchase sovereign bonds on the open market. But it has no tool to offer a short-term loan.

Besides, given demands from Berlin and elsewhere for Athens to stick to its bailout commitments, it is unlikely a bridge loan — even if it existed — would come without tough conditions akin to the current bailout.

More here: Q&A: Greece and the bridge to nowhere

More commentators are waking up to the fact that Greece is likely to compromise at tomorrow night’s eurogroup [as readers of this blog learned yesterday afternoon].

But, as the Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard points out, we don’t know if Greece’s lenders will play ball.

Greece’s defence minister has also waded into the bailout crisis, suggesting that Athens could tap “another source” for funding.

Panos Kammenos told Mega television that Greece could seek funding from “the United States at best” or even China or Russia, if a eurozone deal cannot be agreed.

Kammenos declared:

“What we want is a deal.”

“But if there is no deal and if we see that Germany remains unbending and wants to blow Europe apart, then we have the obligation to go to Plan B. Plan B is to get funding from another source.”

That sounds alarming, but there are two reasons to be cautious. Kammenos’s remit doesn’t run to the finance ministry, and as the head of the Independent Greeks (the junior coalition partner) he may not be privy to Alexis Tsipras’s inner thoughts.

Back at the G20 meeting in Istanbul, Canada’s finance minister has argued that Greece isn’t the same threat to world stability as in 2012.

Reuters has the details:

Regulatory and financial reforms have helped diminish the risk Greece may pose to the euro zone, Canada’s finance minister said on Tuesday, amidst growing concern about Athens’ determination to ease austerity measures.

Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of the G20 meeting of finance ministers and central bankers, Joe Oliver also said the mood at the talks was ‘determined’, but not optimistic.

One of the new Greek government’s loudest media critics isn’t too impressed by the compromise plan being drawn up in Athens:

So, what is this compromise plan that is calming the Greek crisis this morning?

As we wrote in yesterday’s liveblog, it revolves around Wednesday night’s Eurogroup meeting of eurozone finance chiefs.

Finance ministry sources have told us that Yanis Varoufakis will suggest a bridging loan until September, which Greece’s creditors may well view as an extension of its existing bailout [which runs out in under three weeks].

That will create a window to haggle out a proper long-term deal with creditors.

Varoufakis will accept 70% of the existing bailout programme, and offer 10 new measures to cover the 30% gap. Those new measures will be devised with the OECD (whose head, Angel Gurria, is in Athens today)

And Greece will also hope to tap some of the €7bn bailout payment that is being withheld until Athens meets previous bailout targets.

It sounds like the framework for a deal. But there’s one major problem – no eurozone partner has said they’ll back it. And Germany’s Angela Merkel and Wolfgang Schäuble were adamant on Monday that Greece must stick to its bailout programme. So Varoufakis may find he has little room to manoeuvre.

Greek bonds are rising, a little, in early trading, suggesting that investors are a little less worried about the crisis.

This has pushed down the yield (or interest rate) on Greece 10-year bond to 10.9%, down from 11.3% on Monday night. That’s still a worryingly high yield; anything over 7% means a country is basically locked out of the markets.

But it suggests that yesterday’s rumours that Greece might make some concessions at tomorrow night’s eurogroup meeting may be creating some calm.

George Osborne’s warning may not reassure the City, where traders are already fretting about the Greek crisis.

Investors have been unnerved by Sunday night’s speech by Greece’s prime minister, in which Alexis Tsipras vowed to overturn austerity and pursue Germany for war reparations.

Stan Shamu, analyst at IG, says:

After a period of relative calm following the ascension of Syriza to power, the type of rhetoric that investors were initially fearing is beginning to flow through.

In the City, the FTSE 100 has dipped by 15 points in early trading.

John Longworth, the head of the British Chambers of Commerce, sounds less worried than George Osborne about the Greek crisis. He reckons British business wouldn’t actually be severely hurt if Greece left the eurozone.

In a TV interview as the BCC’s conference begins, Longworth said the UK exports relatively little to Greece. And with the European financial system stronger than in 2012, a Grexit probably would be containable.

However... it would be a very different matter if the crisis then spread to other European countries, Longworth added.

I suspect George Osborne’s comments may not go down too well with the rest of Europe.

Our Europe editor, Ian Traynor, reports that top diplomants in Brussels reacted with bemusement to David Cameron’s emergency Grexit meeting on Monday. Is the UK making too much fuss?