Yanis Varoufakis in Le Monde Diplomatique:
On 30 January, a few days after I became finance minister, the president of the Eurogroup, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, paid me a visit. Within minutes he asked me what I was planning to do vis-à-vis the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that the previous government had signed up to. I explained to him that our government was elected to re-negotiate that MoU; that is, we would be asking for an opportunity to re-visit the blueprint of fiscal and reform policies that had failed so spectacularly over the past five years, having diminished national income by one third and turned the whole of Greek society against the very notion of reform.
Dijsselbloem’s response was immediate and crystal clear: “That won’t work. It is either the MoU or the programme crashes.” In other words, either we would have to accept the failed policies that were imposed on previous Greek governments, and which we were elected to challenge, or our banks would be shut down — for this is what a “crashed programme” entails in the case of a member state that has no market access: the European Central Bank removes financing of the banks, whose doors and ATMs then shut down.
This blatant attempt at blackmailing an incoming, democratically elected government was no one-off. At the Eurogroup meeting that followed 11 days later, Dijsselbloem’s disregard for democracy’s most basic principle was confirmed, and enhanced, by Schäuble, who spoke immediately after Michel Sapin, the French finance minister. Sapin had just argued in favour of discovering common ground between the validity of the existing MoU and the right of the Greek people to mandate us to re-negotiate crucial parts of the MoU. Schäuble lost no time in giving short shrift to Sapin’s reasonable point: “Elections cannot be allowed to change anything,” he said, with a large majority of finance ministers nodding along.
At the end of that same meeting, while negotiating the joint statement to be released, I asked that the word “amended” be added in front of “MoU” in a sentence that was meant to commit our government to the latter. Schäuble vetoed my proposed phrase, saying that the existing MoU was not to be negotiated just because the Greeks had elected a new government. After a few hours of the resulting standoff, Dijsselbloem threatened me with an imminent “programme collapse” (which translated into bank closures by 28 February) if I insisted on adding “amended” in front of “MoU”.
More here.