Greece set to lose last friend in EU as Sapin's patience runs out

In Riga at the end of April, Greece may have lost its last friend in Europe.

At the eurozone meeting in the Latvian capital, Michel Sapin, the French finance minister who once adopted a sympathetic tone towards Yanis Varoufakis, joined the chorus of criticism directed at his Greek counterpart.

"Greece must go faster now," Mr Sapin said, echoing the frustration voiced by the other European finance ministers at the gathering. "We're wasting time, and time is precious."

At the start of the current crisis, Mr Sapin stood out as the most prominent defender of Greece's new Syriza government, urging his European counterparts to compromise with the debt-laden country. When Mr Varoufakis stopped in Paris in February to plead for a new bailout, Mr Sapin said Athens needed time to put together a list of reforms. "We need serene days so that the Greek government can breathe," he said then.

French government officials say his tougher stance simply reflects impatience at the lack of progress in negotiations and Athens' looming repayment deadlines. It does not reflect any change in substance, they insist, as France has always requested that Greece fulfil its debt obligations.

"Talks are not progressing as fast as they should," one Paris official said.

But the change of tack has triggered a sense of relief in Berlin and other capitals that France is now unambiguously aligned with its fellow European powers. It has also helped assuage suspicions of French leniency, with Paris in the past three years having railed against austerity and battled with Brussels over its own missed deficit targets.

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A senior European official said: "Even the French, who over the past five years have always been very decent to the authorities in Greece, have realised there is no rendezvous with reality in Athens. There is no action."

According to people present at one of Mr Varoufakis's first eurogroup meetings in February, Mr Sapin spoke up early in the debate to press for a change in attitude towards Athens.

But that sentiment was not shared. The next minister to speak was Italy's Pier Carlo Padoan, normally seen as a proponent of flexibility in the EU's fiscal policy. He took a very different line, arguing Greece had to stick to the rules of the existing bailout programme. No other minister spoke up in defence of Athens after that, officials said.

<>People who have spoken with Mr Padoan said he, like many other ministers, had grown impatient with Mr Varoufakis, who early in his tenure publicly claimed Italian sovereign debt was unsustainable. This prompted a public rebuke - Mr Padoan tweeted that Mr Varoufakis was "inappropriate" - that chilled relations between Rome and Athens.

Since the February 20 agreement to extend Greece's €172bn bailout into June, Mr Sapin has become far less accommodating. According to two eurozone officials present at the Riga meeting, Mr Sapin was particularly angry over delays caused by discussions about irrelevant logistical issues - such as where meetings should be held and who should attend - even though both sides knew the substantive differences they had to resolve.

Like other ministers in Riga, Mr Sapin told Mr Varoufakis that the boundaries of the current programme had to be respected, saying that while eurozone creditors could be flexible, such flexibility had to be within the structure of the existing programme - the line Mr Schauble has taken since the start of the current stand-off. He also argued that Mr Varoufakis must respect the eurozone's rules.

At the end of the meeting, the 63-year old French socialist even mocked his Greek counterpart's exposure in French magazines, which included a recent controversial photo-shoot in Paris Match showing him embracing his glamorous wife and drinking wine on his terrace with a view of the Acropolis.

"I told him I had read Philosophie Magazine," Mr Sapin told reporters. "It's better than Paris Match."

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