Fotis Kouvelis, the Democratic Left leader, attended a meeting with other Greek political leaders that was called by PresidentÂ Karolos Papoulias on Tuesday. The last-ditch attempt to create a coalition government failed.  ATHENS — As Greece’s president warned about the possibility of bank runs, Greek political leaders said Tuesday that they had again failed to form a government, ushering the rudderless country toward new elections that could lead to its leaving the euro.  After the failure of the last-ditch attempt to form a unity government that would honor the country’s commitments to its foreign lenders, President Karolos Papoulias was expected to make plans for a caretaker government on Wednesday, with a new round of elections next month.  The call for new elections sent shudders across the euro zone, where concerns flared that rising anti-bailout forces in Greece’s Parliament could lead the nation to default on its debts, setting off new troubles in Portugal and Ireland, which are also highly indebted and rely on foreign loans.  While the new French president, François Hollande, was in Germany to express his concerns about excessive austerity with Chancellor Angela Merkel, the dissolution of the Greek state accelerated. Mr. Papoulias told party leaders on Tuesday that nearly $900 million had been pulled from Greek banks since the May 6 elections, and that the Greek central bank had warned of “a great fear that could develop into a panic.”  “The next two days things will get worse,” Mr. Papoulias said.  Since the end of 2009, when the crisis first hit, Greeks have withdrawn an estimated $4 billion in savings a month from the country’s banks, according to the country’s central bank, and $6.5 billion was pulled in January alone. Such fears are certain to provide the backdrop for an election campaign in which the two once-dominant parties, the Socialists and New Democracy, attempt to win voters back after collapsing at the polls.  While the voting last week was cathartic for many Greeks, the failure to form a government underscored the depth of the troubles the country faces. The debt crisis here last week precipitated the collapse of a political order that helped drive the country into a downward spiral and now seems powerless to steer it out.  “This is the problem of the country,” said Loukas Tsoukalis, the president of the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy, a research group in Athens. “On the one hand there is a failed political class, on the other demagogues who ride on anger.”  The developments have exasperated Europe’s wealthy northern tier states, especially Germany. On Tuesday, Mrs. Merkel and Mr. Hollande, in their first joint news conference, said they hoped Greece would stay within the euro. But behind the scenes, the sentiment is growing in Berlin that Greece should be encouraged to exit the euro zone for the greater good of other economies that are more dedicated to mending their tattered finances, including Ireland, Spain and Portugal, said Paul De Grauwe, a professor of economics at the London School of Economics.  “The feeling is that Greece has been a terrible drag on the whole system, and if Greece leaves and we can set up a firewall that will guard against contagion, in the end this may be better for the euro zone,” he said.  Yet the risks of such brinkmanship could run high. No one knows if the financial defenses Europe raised against the possible domino effect of a Greek default or exit will work.  Nor is it clear that the European Central Bank would be willing to spend the hundreds of billions of euros it would take to maintain confidence in the broader European banking system, which still holds piles of sovereign bonds from Greece, Spain, Portugal and other nations that have fallen into difficulty.  “The trouble with Greece is that any effort to get it out of the euro is likely to intensify pressure on other countries,” Mr. De Grauwe said. “The scenario of contagion is a very serious one.”  There was much finger-pointing after the breakdown in talks on Tuesday. The Socialists’ leader, Evangelos Venizelos, said that he hoped Greeks would make a more “historically well-considered” choice when they returned to the polls. He added that the talks on a unity government had failed “because certain individuals put their party’s interest above the good of the country.”
The decision by President Karolos Papoulias could set off a series of events that would lead Greece to abandon the euro.