In your report (Varoufakis extends Washington DC charm offensive after talks with Lagarde, 7 April), you refer to speculation among eurozone officials that a deal with Greece can only be achieved if “Tsipras agrees to dismember his own party and join up with centrist forces to form a new coalition”. This is deemed necessary, you say, because Syriza’s leftwing minister Panagiotis Lafazanis opposes privatisations, but “controls around a third of Syriza’s MPs”.The invention of such scenarios by unelected European and IMF officials, whose job is to serve rather than unseat elected politicians, reveals an alarming disregard for Greece’s democratic institutions and a blatant violation of EU rules which they like to lecture Syriza about. Moreover, the report overlooks the fact that Yanis Varoufakis has already submitted a list of effective non-recessionary reforms, of which the first, the instalment scheme, has achieved half of its target for 2015 (€200m) within three weeks. Finally, the notion that Lafazanis “controls” a third of Syriza is pure fiction whose aim is to unsettle the new Greek government and impose the extra-parliamentary schemes of unruly neoliberal bureaucrats. Dr Alexander KazamiasCoventry University Continue reading...
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