The new Greek finance minister was facing calls to quit yesterday, with critics accusing him of turning the country into an international laughing stock.
Hours before Yanis Varoufakis was due to discuss reform measures with European creditors, the opposition conservative party called for him to resign. They argued that his policies — in particular, a proposal to use tourists to clamp down on tax evaders — were risible.
The plan to arm tourists, housewives and students with spy cameras while they posed as shoppers to see if they were given receipts was one of seven measures sent by Mr Varoufakis to the head of the Eurogroup to explain how the Greek government planned to improve its tax collection efforts.
In his 11-page report to creditors, Mr Varoufakis said that the findings of the amateur spies would be “collected immediately by tax authorities who would then issue penalties and sanctions”.
Greece’s creditors were unimpressed. At a meeting of eurozone finance ministers in Brussels last night, Mr Varoufakis was told to come up with a proper programme by tomorrow.
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“We have spent now two weeks apparently discussing who meets whom where, in what configuration, and on what agenda and it is a complete waste of time,” Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the Dutch finance minister who heads the Eurogroup, said.
“We’ve talked about this long enough now,” he told reporters, after the fourth meeting on Greece in Brussels in a month. An agreement on economic reforms is crucial to releasing vital funds to assure Greece’s financial survival.
Even in Greece, Mr Varoufakis’s proposal to turn citizens into tax inspectors has been ridiculed. Critics said that it went against a deeply ingrained “anti-snitching” culture. Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the conservative whip in Greece’s 300-seat parliament, said that Mr Varoufakis’s policies were “dangerous” and called for him to stand down. “He has become unstoppable and impetuous, shooting from the mouth and conducting anything but dignified negotiations,” Mr Mitsotakis told reporters.
Alexis Tsipras, the prime minister, had earlier appeared to distance himself from his finance minister, saying that he wanted “more action and less words”. However, Mr Tsipras could also have been referring to his defence minister, Panos Kammenos, who threatened on Sunday to unleash “millions” of migrants — including Islamist terrorists — on Europe unless the EU softened its austerity demands.
“If Europe abandons us to the crisis, we will submerge it with migrants, and it will be too bad for Berlin if in the midst of that human tide of millions of economic migrants there are jihadists from Islamic State mixed in,” Mr Kammenos said, according to the Italian newspaper La Repubblica.
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Mr Kammenos is the head of the small, right-wing Independent Greeks party, which joined the prime minister’s Syriza party in the coalition. As defence minister, he oversees Greece’s border with Turkey, where thousands of Syrian refugees have sought shelter.
Unlike the UK, Greece is a member of the Schengen Area, which covers 26 EU states and allows people to travel without passports.
“If they let us fall, we will distribute documents to migrants coming from anywhere which are valid for circulating across the open Schengen frontiers of Europe, so that the human tide can reach Berlin without problems,” said Mr Kammenos.
Mr Kammenos is a noted nationalist who has previously described Europe as being “governed by German neo-Nazis”. However, members of the left-wing Syriza party have made similar threats. On Saturday, Nikos Kotzias, foreign minister and Syriza member, told his EU counterparts that if Greece was left to collapse millions of migrants, and thousands of jihadists, would head for Europe. “Greece’s credit partners should take its position much more seriously,” Mr Kotzias said.