Flickr/Brookings Institution. Some rights reserved.At the end of April the media reported that a government "downgraded" the role of its finance minister because of his allegedly poor handling of the negotiations over the Greek debt. I regret that this targeted the wrong finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis not Wolfgang Schäuble. If as speculation has it, the role change for Mr Varoufakis from direct negotiations to long-distance oversight resulted from his abrupt and inflexible manner, that only reinforces my view that the wrong finance minister took a hit. Elements of the German media also assessed its finance minister as a bull in the negotiation china shop.
Mr Schäuble is a man most insistent that the Syriza government fulfil the policy "reform" agreement reached with the previous, discredited government led by Antonis Samaras. When a journalist pointed out to him that the Greek electorate had rejected that agreement, Mr Schäuble took the opportunity to put the knife in,
"The Greeks [sic! Greek government] certainly will have a difficult time to explain the deal to their voters. As long as the [troika] programme [of December 2014] isn’t successfully completed, there will be no payout."
