Accompanied by SYRIZA’s economic policy chief, Yiannis Dragasakis, the party’s leader Alexis Tsipras met with European Central Bank President Mario Draghi on Tuesday in Frankfurt and discussed the party's alternative agenda for a final solution to the Greek crisis, promoting his views on how Greece would achieve sustainability of its debt. During their meeting with the ECB chief, the two men forwarded the leftists’ belief that Greece needs a substantial reduction of its debt rather than an extension of maturities and lowering of interest rates that eurozone appears to propel. Dragasakis and Tsipras also underlined their belief in a New Deal driven by the ECB and the European Investment Bank to revive growth in the eurozone, arguing however that the measures taken by Draghi last week, including the introduction of negative interest rates, would not have an effect in Greece due to deflation and the poor state of Greek banks.
Christos Kalloniatis (Professor of the Department of Cultural Technology and Communication at the University of the Aegean), Iris Kritikou (Archaeologist-Historian of Art), Konstantinos Maniatopoulos (Director of the Stratis Eleftheriadis-Tériade Museum – Library, Visual Artist-Historian of Art), Irine Vasilopoulou