Contentious former Greek minister Yianis Varoufakis struck again this week from Athens, grimly predicting that his former political ally, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, faces a bleak future.
“The path Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has taken, which is subjugation to the dogma of ‘everything for the next (bailout) tranche’, will not lead to a pleasant end, neither personally nor for his political legacy,” Varoufakis said on Wednesday, in comments to a radio station in Athens.
The flamboyant economist, author and recent Europe-wide political activist led the leftist Tsipras government’s shambolic negotiations with creditors in the first half of 2015.
In other statements, he called the prospect of an annual 3.5-percent (of GDP) primary budget surplus target for Greece “preposterous”.
Moreover, in a dig against his erstwhile counterparts in ruling SYRIZA, he again decried Berlin’s stance via-a-vis the Samaras government in the summer of 2014, saying it was “unacceptable”.
Alexis Tsipras and his radical leftists scored a landslide election victory against Samaras’ center-right coalition government in January 2015, after first provoking a snap election via a failure by Parliament to elect of the country’s figurehead president of the republic.
“Before the election in January 2015 I repeatedly referred to the offensive manner in which Berlin had behaved to the Samaras government, despite the fact that I was an (political) opponent of Mr. Samaras, as you know,” he said in response to a question on the Vima FM station.
