Alexis Tsipras goes to Berlin as divide over Greek debt widens

When German chancellor Angela Merkel welcomes Alexis Tsipras to Berlin for the first time as prime minister today, the two leaders will work hard to make it seem like any other official visit.

Both leaders say their first private discussions should focus on improving relations that have plunged to new lows in recent weeks, as German demands that Athens honours its bailout pledges were countered by Greek claims that Berlin had outstanding war-reparation bills.

Merkel officials say the latest standoff with Athens isn’t a bilateral spat with Berlin, but there is little doubt that crisis cracks are widest – and getting wider – between northern Europe’s rules-based Germans and southern Europe’s pragmatic Greeks.

“The meeting will not be pressured by the [euro zone] negotiations,” said Mr Tsipras at the weekend. “This is very important as both sides will be able to discuss important problems besetting Europe, but also the strengthening of bilateral relations.”

The Greek prime minister goes into today’s talks with his Syriza party enjoying 42 per cent in polls, popularity enjoyed by no other party since the crisis began. This, he says, is his mandate to rebalance austerity with stimulus measures. German officials, meanwhile, insist Greece is obliged to meet demands of impatient European Union partners: to continue its fiscal diet and slim down state spending as laid down in EU-IMF agreements.

Face-saving compromise Neither capital has missed an opportunity to antagonise the other in recent weeks, but the two leaders know that failing to agree a face-saving compromise would bring

unpredictable consequences for each – and the euro area. Mr Tsipras must convince Dr Merkel that he can come up with a list of reforms acceptable at euro-zone level so the remaining tranche of bailout loans worth €7.2 billion can be released.

He will also need to assure her that he can withstand a potential political revolt within Syriza should some of those reforms be seen by MPs as backtracking on the party’s election pledges.

Dr Merkel’s task is to appear firm but fair: insist that promises made are kept and flag the difficulty in selling further concessions to her mutinous backbenchers. But on Friday, in Brussels, Dr Merkel appeared to open a window to compromise, insisting Greece was “not obliged to implement recessionary measures” but free to substitute EU-IMF reform measures with its own.

There is little expectation that Germany’s €63 billion contribution to bailout loans will ever be repaid, and dwindling support for a third bailout. A deep-seated cultural chauvinism in Germany towards Greece hasn’t been helped by delays over promised reforms, or weekend allegations of a conflict of interest against a Tsipras minister.

According to a report in To Vima newspaper, a minister charged with rehiring public-sector employees laid off by the last government had previously signed contracts with the same employees, granting him a 12 per cent commission on compensation after successful court action.

The minister, George Katrougalos, has received the full backing of the prime minister and denies any conflict of interest, stating he had severed all contacts prior to taking office. But such allegations only revive suspicions in Germany that Greece occupies a different political reality from its EU partners.

That was underlined last week in Brussels, where the European Commission predicted a “critical” liquidity situation in Athens mid-April while Mr Tsipras denied this is the case. He has vowed to honour a month-old promise to submit reforms but disagrees with Dr Merkel’s suggestion that this will involve a list of incomplete reforms submitted by the last Greek government in December.

Tempers have been raised further by renewed claims from Greece that Germany engaged in diplomatic trickery to avoid repaying a loan forced by Nazi occupying forces from the Greek national bank. Berlin officials insist the window for reparations demands has closed, and resent Athens for hauling out the Nazi cudgel.

But the Greek claim lingers in the air, particularly among Germany’s political left.

On wider bailout issues, however, Syriza’s only real ally in Berlin is its political sister party, Die Linke. “If you want our money back, then go get it from those who got it, and that wasn’t Greek pensioners and nurses but the international banks and the Greek upper classes,” said Sahra Wagenknecht, deputy leader of Die Linke, to Dr Merkel last week in the Bundestag.

Flow of bad news Elsewhere, Mr Tsipras knows there is little criticism of Merkellian reform medicine or bailout logic. The mainstream German media report regularly on the human consequences of the swingeing health cuts in Greece, but rarely is a link made between funding shortfalls and the passage of bailout loans via Athens back to its creditors.

Instead, exhausted by a seemingly endless flow of bad news, most Germans just wish Greece could be a bit more like Ireland. On Saturday evening, Germany’s main television news ran a report on Irish anti-water charge marches, yet still managed to frame Ireland as an anti-Greece, “swallowing austerity measures without protest over six years”.