Adults in the Room by Yanis Varoufakis

Author:Yanis Varoufakis [Varoufakis, Yanis]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 9781847924469
Google: gwWpDAEACAAJ
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2017-05-14T22:00:00+00:00

Schäuble’s revenge

When negotiating from a weak position, a crackling telephone line only makes things worse. In face-to-face meetings one can at least use one’s voice, eye contact and physical presence to gain greater control of the room. The teleconference format, by contrast, makes an already challenging meeting harder still. On this occasion, to level out the grossly uneven playing field I had succeeded in securing a commitment from Jeroen Dijsselbloem that the teleconference would only allow the leaders of the three institutions (European Commission, ECB and IMF) to deliver a binary verdict: was my list ‘sufficiently comprehensive to act as the basis for a successful conclusion of the final review’ of Greece’s second bailout agreement or was it not? That was the only question on the table that day. Indeed, at the end of the previous Eurogroup meeting on 20 February Jeroen had told everyone, much to Wolfgang Schäuble’s particular disappointment, that there would be no debate during our teleconference on 24 February. Its limited remit was to allow the institutions to emit either white smoke or black. Nothing else.

With prior agreement to my list having been secured, albeit unofficially, it would have been exceedingly surprising if white smoke did not appear. But if it did not, I had enough ammunition to expose the troika’s duplicity at a press conference and win the blame game. My main fear was that Wolfgang would somehow overturn the ban on a debate, initiate one over the sputtering phone line and somehow get the MoU back on the table. All my mental energy went into imagining how he would try to do this and how I would stop him. My best defence lay with Jeroen’s prior and explicit commitment, but did I trust the Dutchman?

As it turned out, Wolfgang did not have to gatecrash the teleconference with a debate, nor did Jeroen have to go back on his promise to prevent one. The set-up was cleverer than I had imagined. It became apparent as soon as the institutions’ leaders opened their mouths. The first to speak was Dobrovskis, the Latvian vice chair of the European Commission: ‘In the view of the Commission this list is sufficiently comprehensive to act as the basis for a successful conclusion of the final review …’ White smoke as expected, I thought with a sigh of relief. But then Dobrovskis continued: ‘Let me stress, however, that … this list does not substitute the MoU, which constitutes the official legal basis for the programme.’

Confounded at first, I quickly recognized what was going on: Wolfgang Schäuble had risen from his humiliation three days before and was once more in full control. Over the weekend, while I had been struggling to produce a replacement for the MoU, the German finance minister had been successfully turning the tide back in his favour – so successfully that he did not have to interrupt, force a debate or even speak at all in order to resuscitate the MoU.4 By stating clearly that my list did not ‘substitute the MoU’ Dobrovskis had done Schäuble’s work for him.

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