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In Her Memoirs, Germany’s Merkel Recalls How Greece was ‘Saved’
Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel writes in her autobiography ‘Freedom: Memoirs 1954-2021’, published on Tuesday, that during the 2010s debt crisis that threatened to cripple Greece and undermine the Eurozone, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras proved to be a surprisingly tough negotiator.
Recalling the tense negotiations in June 2015, when EU officials in the early hours of the morning agreed a bailout deal for Athens, Merkel writes that she was left speechless when Tsipras announced to her that he would now have to put the deal to a referendum.
In a phone call with Tsipras and then French Prime Minister Francois Hollande, Merkel asked the Greek premier about his government’s recommendation to the voters in the referendum.
Tsipras answered that his government would not advise them to support the financially-severe bailout programme.
“Of all the phone calls I have ever made in my political life, this one was perhaps the biggest surprise. For a moment, Hollande and I were speechless,” Merkel said, according to the Greek edition of her autobiography.
Capital controls introduced to prevent a massive withdrawal of finance from the country, and on July 5, 2015, a total of 61.3 per cent of Greek voters in the referendum cast ballots against the bailout programme.
But Merkel was determined to keep Greece in the eurozone. On July 12, she held new negotiations with Greek officials alongside Hollande and European Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso.
The Greek representative participated with great zeal, stressed Merkel, adding that Tsipras this time “had selected good banking experts in his delegation.”
In the morning they signed a new bailout programme with financing from the EU stability mechanism.
“Now Greece was also saved,” Merkel wrote.
Greece faced a sovereign debt crisis that started in late 2009. Greek governments introduced tax increases, spending cuts, and reforms from 2010 to 2016, which ignited riots and protests.
However, bailout loans were given by the International Monetary Fund, Eurogroup and the European Central Bank – the so-called ‘Troika’, which was despised by many Greeks – in 2010, 2012, and 2015.
Merkel and Tsipras met again in 2019 in Greece and talked about the events of 2015, according to her autobiography, which includes a chapter titled ‘On a Knife Edge’ about the crisis period.
“Tsipras explained to me how it was important to show to the [Greek] citizens in a convincing way that the new government had exhausted all possibilities to get rid of the hated troika,” she said.
“The majority of Greeks rejected the [bailout] programme but wanted the country to remain in the euro. This was shown by Tsipras’s re-election in the new, early elections in September 2015. The euro had proven stronger,” she concluded.
Merkel’s comments on the crisis negotiations with Tsipras have made headlines in Greece, but autobiography has also been widely covered elsewhere in the world because of her observations about her difficult political relationships with Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.
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