President's visit to Athens after Angel Merkel highlights French ties and EU unity, while Antonis Samaras hails 'historic friend'
They stood behind the same lecterns in the same hall, the press sprawled out before them. Four months and two weeks had elapsed since the German chancellor Angela Merkel, ignoring the din of demonstrators and helicopters roaring overhead, had sought to convey, her eyes flashing this way and that, an essential fact: that she had come to Greece "not as a taskmaster but as a friend to listen and be informed".
On Tuesday, the French president, François Hollande, standing on the same highly polished marble floor, under the ornate roof in the mansion that is the Greek prime minister's office, looked straight ahead. With his hands flapping this way and that, he went a step further.
He had come to Greece to send not only "a message of friendship but a message of support, a message of trust, a message of growth". And he explained his reasons went beyond him being no austerity warmonger.
"Greece needs to be supported by the whole of Europe," pronounced the socialist. "No people in Europe have undergone such a trial, such a test, so we must be at the side of Greece."
The nation is now ensnared in a sixth straight year of recession with unemployment at a European high of 27%.
More than three years after Europe's ongoing debt crisis erupted in the shadow of the Acropolis, the Greek prime minister, Antonis Samaras, also wanted to make clear that the country, for so long at the centre of that drama, may not have survived had it not been for Paris.
"France is a historic friend. The French people have always been on the side of the Greeks," he declared before waxing lyrical about the role the nation had played in the country's 1821 war of independence, the return of democracy after the collapse in 1974 of military rule and its accession to the then EEC in 1981. "France has also given us crucial support over the past few months to stay in Europe and is supporting us today to exit the crisis."
If Merkel's visit last October was all about mending fences ahead of German elections in September – even if greeted with banners declaring "out with the Fourth Reich!" – Hollande's six-hour sojourn in the capital, his first since taking office, was a love-in as only the French know how to do.
Short of leaving his colleague with a French kiss, the president could not have been more lavish in his praise of the Greek leader, a conservative who does not come from the same ideological background but with whom, he remarked, it had been a pleasure to converse in French.
"There is a dual purpose to this trip," said the man from Le Figaro who drew a firm denial from the French leader when he dared to ask if recession-hit France was headed down the Greek route. "And that is to make the point to Angela Merkel that austerity is not the only way [out of this crisis] and to tell people here, that it is he, Hollande, who has ensured that Greece has stayed in the eurozone."
After years of being criticised by its EU partners for failing to implement reforms that have allowed its economy to plunge into freefall, Greece is suddenly being heaped with praise as Paris and Berlin give Athens a vote of confidence in a bid to not only reinforce its international credibility – and attract much-needed investment in so doing – but show that the progress of Europe's problem child is the best proof yet that the continent's crisis is almost over.
Barely two months after creditors at the EU, ECB and IMF agreed to give Athens €54bn (£47bn) in aid, following months of heated argument and debate, the French president said it was now crucial that foreign investors returned to the country. "I will tell our companies that they have to be fully involved in the privatisation process [here]," he said, his face contorting into a wry smile at the mention of Merkel's own relationship with Greece.
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