Greece’s tough-talking finance minister was forced to issue an embarrassing “clarification” yesterday after raising doubts about the country’s future in the euro.
The finance ministry denied that Greece’s membership of the currency was under negotiation, after the minister, Yanis Varoufakis, said that the radical-left government might call a referendum or early elections if its euro partners rejected its debt and growth plans.
Mr Varoufakis, a charismatic British-trained academic, has become a media phenomenon since the Syriza party, led by Alexis Tsipras, took power. But his hasty clarification, after an interview with Corriere della Sera, appeared to underline concerns shared even by Mr Tsipras that he had allowed himself to become over-exposed since stepping on to the world stage.
Mr Tsipras appeared to confirm reports that he had sought to rein in his finance minister, saying he had called for “less words and more action” from all ministers, “not just Mr Varoufakis”.
Critics have said that Mr Varoufakis’s omnipresence in the world media has undermined Greek efforts to win easier bailout terms from its international creditors. Syriza’s own newspaper, Avgi, complained of his “toxic overexposure” this week after much criticism of him, and not a little ridicule, in the Greek media.
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Avgi said that Mr Varoufakis’s loud mouth was “going to spend all the profits” of the support he had garnered for Greece. “Yanis, don’t overdo it,” the newspaper urged. “The economy is not just about the science of running the budget. It is about being frugal with words too.”
His loud mouth risked costing Greece the credit that he had earned for the country since his emergence as an “economics rock star”, it said.
A cartoon in the liberal daily Kathimerini lampooned his omnipresence on television, with a woman telling her husband to change the channel every time Mr Varoufakis popped up on the screen — and her husband replying: “But I am!”
Eurozone finance ministers are meeting in Brussels today to review the latest reform proposals from Athens which it hopes will allow it to qualify for the next multibillion-euro handout.
Mr Varoufakis was also lambasted at the weekend after the leak of one of his latest reform proposals to Brussels. This was a plan to appoint “citizen tax inspectors”, who would be signed up to spy on traders and professionals to garner evidence of fiscal fiddling.
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Pasok, the centre-left party that governed Greece in the initial years of the euro crisis, called Mr Varoufakis’s remarks on a possible referendum “irresponsible, thoughtless and contradictory”. It was a call for a referendum that brought down the Pasok administration of George Papandreou in 2011.
Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, teamed up with Nicolas Sarkozy, the president of France at the time, to force Mr Papandreou to scrap the idea and resign in favour of a caretaker government.