Varoufakis kündigt bei „Ja“-Votum Rücktritt an

Von Markus Fugmann

In einem Interview mit Bloomberg TV hat der griechische Finanzminister Varoufakis indirekt seinen Rücktritt angekündigt, falls die griechische Bevölkerung mit „Ja“ stimmen sollte.

Wörtlich sagte Varoufakis: „Ich würde lieber meinen Arm abschneiden“ als einen Deal zu unterschreiben, der nicht einen Schuldenschnitt beinhalte. Es sei nun Zeit, mit den Spielchen aufzuhören:

„It’s time after five years of extending and pretending that we put a stop to this“.

Und Varoufakis weiter:

„The only way to take ‚Grexit‘ off the table is to get rid of funding
cliffs and the unsustainability of the debt“.

Sollte es zu einem „Ja“-Votum kommen, so Varoufakis weiter, werde es „innerhalb von Stunden“ zu einem Deal kommen können – obwohl die Gläubiger klar gemacht haben, dass das zweite Hilfsprogrammm ausgelaufen ist und die Verhandlungen daher ganz neu beginnen müssen.

Bald einarmig? Der griechische Finanzminister Varoufakis
Foto: Jörg Rüger / Wikipedia (CC BY 3.0)

Besonders interessant sind in diesem Kontext die Aussagen von Varoufakis im April zum „Endspiel“ um Griechenland und die Rolle Berlins (Deutschland) und Frankfurts (EZB):

What if Berlin and Frankfurt do not budge? What if they tell Athens to ‘go jump of the tallest cliff’? The Greek government currently claims that it has a budget surplus. While I strongly doubt this claim, I suspect that a small primary surplus can be concocted through some additional cost cutting and a leximin squeeze of top public sector incomes downwards (without affecting the lowest incomes, pensions and benefits). That should suffice to allow the Athens government to meet its needs during any medium term standoff with Berlin and Frankfurt, as the Greek state will need no financing either from the official sector or from the money markets. In short, the answer to a German “Go jump” can be: “We shall not jump but we shall stay rock solid within the Eurozone and behind our demand for a debt conference. Just watch us.”

Berlin and Frankfurt will, undoubtedly, be furious. They will issue a variety of threats, including the suspension of structural fund flows from Brussels. But the real battleground will be the banks. As they did with Cyprus, where they threatened the government with an immediate suspension of the island nation’s ELA, so too in the case of Greece they will threaten to pull the plug on the Greek banks. Two points need to be made here. First, the Greek banks no longer hold any Greek government debt, which means that their collateral with the European System of Central Banks cannot be downgraded legally. Secondly, Frankfurt will have to think twice before it issues the threat of bending its own rules to close down Greek banks – since doing this would threaten to engulf the whole of the Periphery’s banking system into another cascading panic. Confronted with such a reality, I have good cause to hope that Berlin will prefer to accommodate the Greek government and to look with a great deal more ‘kindness’ the ‘request’ for a debt relief conference. And if it does not, and wishes to bring the Eurozone down with it, let it do its worst, I say.