As Angela Merkel welcomed Alexis Tsipras to her Berlin chancellery, a small welcoming committee gathered outside the fence holding signs reading "We Love Greece".
After five wearying years of Greek drama, there is little love lost for Greek politicians in Germany’s corridors of power. But there was a belated recognition yesterday that both countries have paid a price for spending the last years doing a lot of talking at – and very little talking with – each other.
Three years after her only visit to date to Athens, Angela Merkel’s invitation to her new Greek colleague was intended to pull the emergency brake on a relationship spinning out of control. The future of the Greek EU/IMF programme remains in technical limbo, and with it Greece’s future in the euro, but both tried yesterday to take the chill out of bilateral relations.
Relationship
Behind the tight smiles and tired eyes, Tsipras accepted the offer of his host, dressed in a dazzling, daffodil-yellow blazer. “I brought the good Greek weather – it’s springtime in Berlin,” he said. “This is how the relationship should continue between our two peoples.”
Merkel stuck to her script, insisting that the Greek crisis was not a bilateral standoff between Athens and Berlin. But as the EU’s largest member state and with €63 billion in loans – Greece’s largest EU creditor – Germany is a key player.
The German leader is treading carefully for two reasons. She knows the Berlin diktat idea is one of the sorest points in Greece. And she still has in her ears the protests of smaller EU member states not invited to last Thursday’s late-night “mini-summit” in Brussels, which she attended at the Greek leader’s insistence.
But after countless mini-crises with the EU/IMF troika in Athens, the visit by Tsipras to Berlin was a choreographed breather in the Greek programme’s third major crisis.
This most recent chapter began in January when, anticipating a Syriza victory and its promises to cancel its bailout programme, unnamed German officials told Der Spiegel magazine that the euro zone was far better equipped today to cope with crises than in the past. Earlier fears that a Greek exit could trigger a "domino effect" in the bloc had been supplanted by the view that the euro "chain" might be stronger without its weakest link, officials told the magazine,.
Sigmar Gabriel, the centre- left Social Democrat (SPD) leader and economics minister, rammed the point home by warning that the post-crisis euro zone was no longer as easily "blackmailed".
Senior Berlin officials insist this hard line didn’t come from the German leader, but she hasn’t openly contradicted hardline cabinet ministers.
Just last week, finance minister Wolfgang Schaüble said the Syriza government’s failure to deliver on reform promises – and release €7 billion in frozen funding – had “destroyed the trust” of its EU partners. Thus rescue efforts have been escalated to leader level and to two people who, by many accounts, are each other’s worst nightmare.
For Merkel, Tsipras is an unpredictable handful. She’s had little time to study his methods and weigh up his prospects of either loosening her bailout logic – aid for reforms – or finding allies to challenge her use of the crisis as leverage for tighter EU fiscal controls on national finances.
Underestimate
Tsipras, meanwhile, is not the first newly elected leader to underestimate Angela Merkel’s dogged grasp of both the EU crisis detail and her neighbours’ priorities and weak spots. Though she hides it well, the German leader feels she has been pragmatic in the crisis, moving Berlin beyond its comfort zone to accept little- loved bailouts in exchange for reforms.
For her domestic survival, she cannot afford to let Greece slip on this front. But she also knows who the history books will blame if the euro stumbles or falls.
And so their press conference yesterday was marked by grudging recognition of each other’s tactical skill. The euro crisis can only be solved, they acknowledged, by squaring the circle to balance national will with EU commitments.
For a few hours at least, the ceasefire held, with even Greece's most vociferous critic in Germany – the Bild tabloid – all sweetness and light. It welcomed Tsipras in a bilingual front page and listed 50 reasons, from Aristotle to Ouzo, why the Greeks are "dear" to the Germans – ambiguity intended.