(Bloomberg) -- Ask
Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis about his country’s predicament, and
you’re likely to get a very different response from the one echoing around the
euro region.
Impressions aside,
Greece is running out of time, money and friends. France’s Michel Sapin, whose
government had made the most conciliatory noises toward Greek calls for less
austerity, expressed frustration with Varoufakis. Spain’s finance minister,
concerned about an anti-austerity insurrection at home, also hardened the
rhetoric.
“The time comes when
what’s needed is not declarations of intentions or slogans, but figures and
verifiable data,” Sapin said in Brussels.
Greece is seeking the
disbursement of an aid payment totaling about 7 billion euros ($7.5 billion)
amid speculation its coffers could be empty by the end of the month. With
technicians representing the European Commission, European Central Bank and
International Monetary Fund set to begin work Wednesday to assess the nation’s
needs, officials around the euro zone have complained about the lack of
progress.
Much of the
negotiations of the past few weeks have been a “complete waste of time,”
according to Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem.
‘How Serious?’
“Not so much has
happened,” in Greece since the euro area in February allowed the government’s
loan agreement to be extended by four months,’’ he told reporters after the
meeting. “So the question arises: how serious are they?”
For Varoufakis, 53, an
economist whose expertise is game theory, all is working well and the
government is on course to meet all its debt obligations.
“I believe that we are
doing our job properly,” Varoufakis said at the conclusion of Monday’s talks.
“Our job is to start the process which is necessary for the European Central
Bank to have confidence.”
After promising the
electorate it would break free from the conditions tied to the country’s
bailout, the government committed to coming up with a package of economic reforms
in exchange for the aid. It now has to give more details of how it will
implement them.
Irritated Officials
Euro-area finance
ministers have told Varoufakis to make his language less divisive, a separate
European official said on Tuesday. Ministers are irritated with the way he was
communicating, the official said.
Varoufakis annoyed the
Italian government when he said on Feb. 8 that Italian officials had told him
their country was at risk of bankruptcy. Finance Minister Pier Carlo Padoan
said Varoufakis’s comments were “out of place.”
While the north-south
divide would once have given Greece some natural allies against German-led
austerity, there are also political reasons for shunning Varoufakis.
In Spain, the
anti-austerity Podemos party is leading most opinion polls before an election
due by the end of the year. Portugal is due to vote in September or October,
with Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho’s Social Democrats trailing in recent
surveys.
The Greek government
“was attempting to build alliances with the southern periphery and also with
Italy and France -- other countries that have also been opposed to austerity,”
said Mujtaba Rahman, a former European Union official who is now director of
European analysis at the Eurasia Group in London. “For very different reasons,
each of these individual states has come out essentially in alliance with
Germany.”
That leaves Europe’s
most indebted nation “up against an axis, with Spain and Portugal at the
vanguard,” Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said last month. The remarks
drew a hostile response from Spanish Economy Minister Luis de Guindos, who also
expressed unhappiness after Monday’s talks.
Sometimes, Greek
ministers’ “messages aren’t much aligned,” de Guindos said after the
discussions. “The Greek government is aware of that.”
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