Greece and its sceptical eurozone partners traded barbs Monday over rewriting the country's massive bailout programme, deepening a bitter stand-off ahead of a make-or-break meeting in Brussels.
A protester in a Wolfgang Schaeuble mask holds a syringe reading "austerity" at a rally outside parliament in Athens on February 15, 2015
The hard-left government of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras is trying to win a significant overhaul to the terms of its 240 billion euro bailout which it says has damaged the Greek economy after years of imposed austerity.
But influential German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble set an uncompromising tone ahead of the meeting of the eurozone's 19 finance ministers, accusing the Tsipras government of being irresponsible.
"I feel sorry for the Greeks at the moment. They've elected a government which is currently acting irresponsibly," Schaeuble told German public radio.
"My guess is that it's all a big game of poker for this new government," he said, adding that it was up to Greece to decide if it wanted to remain in the eurozone and to take the necessary steps if so.
- 'Debt colony' -
Tsipras was swept into power after elections last month on a promise to tear up Greece's current bailout agreement, all the while keeping the country in the 19-member eurozone.
To meet that promise, Tsipras is asking his eurozone partners to ditch the current bailout deal and to agree to six months of short-term funding to buy the time to hammer out a new agreement, this time without austerity conditions.
"We don't need money, we need time to realise our reform plans," Tsipras said on Sunday, two days after his first encounter with Germany's austerity champion Chancellor Angela Merkel at an EU summit.
Greece will be represented by new finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, a hard-charging professor and blogger, who wrote in an opinion piece before the talks that Greece was not interested "in playing games".
"The great difference between this government and previous Greek governments is twofold: We are determined to clash with mighty vested interests in order to reboot Greece and gain our partners’ trust," Varoufakis wrote in the New York Times.
"We are also determined not to be treated as a debt colony that should suffer what it must," he said.
Arriving for the talks, EU Economic Affairs Commissioner Pierre Moscovici said he believed a deal was within reach despite the acrimony.
"This is a discussion that I know will be complicated but I am certain that we can agree. The will to agree is there," Moscovici said.
At the height of the debt crisis in 2011-12 the possibility that Greece would crash out of the euro panicked world markets, afraid the crisis in Athens would doom the currency bloc and destabilise the global economy.
Analysts say this is much less likely now because of changes made to strengthen the eurozone's defences but markets are still watching Monday's talks closely.
The Greek stock exchange dropped by more than 3.0 percent ahead of the 1400 GMT meeting, but European markets were little changed overall, waiting to see what emerged in Brussels.
The eurozone's 18 other member states widely favour a straight rollover of the current Greek programme which ends this month and categorically refuse to write-off any more of Greece's huge mountain of debt.
But Athens refuses any extension of the detested current programme, a stance that especially infuriates Germany, arguing that it has only made the problems worse and has been rejected by the Greek people at the polls.
- 'Decision of principle' -
The challenge is to find wording that satisfies all sides after an informal Eurogroup finance ministers meeting on Wednesday ended in chaos without even an agreed statement.
"I think today we need a decision of general principle on wether Greece wants to extend the current programme or a completely new programme -- or if they want to head on without any programme though I think that is the least probable," a European source told AFP.
The European Union and the International Monetary Fund rescued Greece in 2010 and again in 2012 at a cost of some 240 billion euros ($273 billion).
This included a hugely controversial private sector debt write-down worth more than 100 billion euros, the biggest ever.
In return, previous Greek governments agreed to a series of deep austerity measures and much-resented oversight by the EU, IMF and ECB 'troika' to make sure it stuck to the bailout terms.
The deal kept Greece in the eurozone but it also left Athens with a debt mountain of 315 billion euros, about 1.75 times the size of its economy.
Athens has said this burden will never realistically be repaid and many analysts agree.