Europe debt action back on course after Greeks abandon austerity vote

CANNES, France — Leaders of the world’s most industrialized nations scrambled Thursday to rescue a European Union deal to restructure Greek debts and prevent a regional financial crisis from spreading and creating further global economic disruption.

President Barack Obama and his European Union counterparts held closed doors meetings looking for ways to salvage last week’s marathon EU deal and get the world's economy back on a growth path.

They got some welcomed help when Greece's main opposition party agreed to honor a controversial austerity program that had been set last week as part of a deal to provide debt relief to Greece. That move headed off the likelihood that Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou would be forced from office over his proposal to put the austerity program to a vote of the Greek people _ a step that now seems off the table.

"This is absolutely the best-case scenario," said Jacob Kirkegaard, a Danish research fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. "We have gotten out of these two or three days of mayhem a longer, far more solid political commitment in Greece, which now becomes a bipartisan commitment for following through on these programs."

Thursday was a day of many moving parts in the crisis. The new head of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, who took over Monday, lowered a key benchmark lending rate, signaling that he plans to do more than his predecessor to promote growth aggressively in a region important to the U.S. and global economies.