REUTERS/Yves Herman
Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis.
Former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis is about to drop a bomb on the Greek debt negotiations.
Namely, he is about to reveal why they were never really negotiations at all: the plan was always for Greece to leave the euro.
In a post on his blog on Sunday night, Varoufakis teased the outline of an article that is set to be published in German magazine Die Zeit this Thursday that will explain why Greece's debt negotiations were doomed to fail.
"Five months of intense negotiations between Greece and the Eurogroup never had a chance of success," Varoufakis writes.
"Condemned to lead to impasse, their purpose was to pave the ground for what [German finance minister] Dr [Wolfgang] Schäuble had decided was 'optimal' well before our government was even elected: That Greece should be eased out of the Eurozone in order to discipline member-states resisting his very specific plan for re-structuring the Eurozone."
Varoufakis adds that, "This is no theory" because he says Schäuble told him this was the plan.
We would note that on Friday, Varoufakis published a piece in The Guardian arguing that the Greek debt negotiations and the turn they've taken in the last few months, were main about Germany wanting "to put the fear of God into the French." And so this has been, in Varoufakis's mind, all about intra-European intimidation.
Varoufakis adds in his post on Sunday night that he wrote this article as, "a European observing the unfolding of a particular Plan for Europe - Dr Schäuble's Plan."
He concludes that he will be asking Die Zeit's readers 2 things:
- Is this a Plan that you approve of?
- Do you consider this Plan good for Europe?
And so we wait.