Greece’s best hope of remaining in the eurozone may now run through Paris, where president François Hollande has emerged as a tireless — and lonely — advocate for keeping Athens in the fold, reports The Financial Times.
Even as other eurozone leaders have grown exasperated with Greece’s leftwing prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, and resigned to a Grexit — a Greek exit from the eurozone — Mr Hollande has continued to manoeuvre behind the scenes for a deal that would send about €7.2bn in rescue funds to Athens.
Mr Hollande is determined to keep intact a single currency that was a French-inspired initiative to deepen European integration.
Still, he faces long odds of shifting Angela Merkel, the German chancellor — and a sceptical public in France, where his own approval ratings are mired at historic lows.
“Hollande? He’s a puppet,” said Christine Nicolas, a 54-year-old sculptor who had gathered with hundreds of others in Place de la République in Paris to celebrate Greece’s rejection, in a referendum, of its European bailout programme. “He listens to what Angela Merkel says. He reacts by saying, ‘Oh, that’s not kind!’ But that’s it. At last, there’s a people now rising up against austerity in Europe.”
With Greece’s banks possibly just days from collapse, even France’s finance minister, Michel Sapin, acknowledged the difficulty of snagging a deal from the jaws of failure. “The thread of the negotiation is very thin, very thin,” Mr Sapin warned on Monday.
Mr Hollande’s diplomacy is not only designed to rescue the eurozone from a historic setback and avoid the potential financial fallout of a Grexit that could hit France harder than Germany.
Two years before the next presidential elections, the French politician is also seeking to stay in tune with a public opinion that is arguably more sympathetic than any other in Europe to Greece’s plight. The efforts are also meant to appease a leftwing majority that resents Mr Hollande for reneging on his campaign promise to confront the German chancellor on austerity.