A Guardian article, entitled “Germany refuses Greece an honourable surrender over austerity”, refers to German efforts to corner Greece in a “Carthaginian peace” that — reference to the end of the Punic Wars when victorious Rome erased all traces of rival Carthage and its people.

The article states that Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras on Thursday waved a “white flag of surrender” and would have agreed to swallow most of the conditions demanded by Greece’s EU creditors. Instead of seeing this as progress, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schauble slapped the leftist government down, cornering the country into either total surrender or outright economic war.

The article gives Tsipras both the “moral and intellectual high ground” going into Friday’s eurogroup meeting in Brussels. The Greek demands are now judged as modest, logical and hardly unreasonable.

The article points to two weaknesses faced by Greece
1. the capital flight and dependence on emergency support from the ECB. It is on “life support”.
2. it has failed to deploy its threat to leave the euro, i.e. “Grexit”

Other newspapers:

Le Figaro: Calculates the cost per country that each EZ member state would be forced to pay if there is a Grexit.

Liberation: A “last chance” meeting.

Tagespiegel: The German newspaper’s cover story is titled “Nein, nein, nein, nein…” refering to German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schauble’s resounding no to the Greek request for a six-month extension on Thursday.

Le Monde: Brussels and Germany are divided concerning the Greek proposal.

Bloomberg: The news agency maintains that the policy of austerity would never allow Greece to pay off its debt.