The French magazine Le Point features an extensive profile of the Minister of National Economy and Finance and President of the Eurogroup, Kyriakos Pierrakakis, under the headline “Kyriakos Pierrakakis, the Greek who wants to wake Europe up.” The feature, written by journalists Emmanuel Berretta and Alexia Kefala, traces his political and personal journey, from the reforms he implemented in Greece to his election as president of the Eurogroup, focusing in particular on the priorities he is setting for Europe and his ambition for a more integrated, competitive and dynamic European economy.

Among other things, the article states:

Kyriakos Pierrakakis grew up in Greece, in a country that found itself on the brink of the economic abyss. Today he is President of the Eurogroup. Here is the odyssey of a reformer whose point of reference is Mario Draghi.

On December 11, 2025, the finance ministers of the eurozone elected as head of their coordinating body a man whose country, ten years earlier, had come close to leaving the single currency. The symbolism was lost on no one.

Roland Lescure, France’s Minister of the Economy, recalled that it was in this very same room that the bailout programs for Athens had been decided. Kyriakos Pierrakakis took office for a two-and-a-half-year term, succeeding Ireland’s Paschal Donohoe, who stepped down to take up a position at the World Bank. He is the fifth permanent president of the Eurogroup and the first Greek president. A powerful symbol for a country that once stood on the brink of bankruptcy.

Greece’s “revenge”

The Eurogroup is not provided for in the Treaties, except through an attached protocol. It is an informal group bringing together the 21 finance ministers of the countries that share the euro, following Bulgaria’s accession on January 1. The Eurogroup neither votes nor legislates. Yet it is there that consensus is forged.

And that is precisely why its presidency carries particular weight. The president sets the agenda, decides when an issue is ripe for discussion, plays a decisive role in the most important institutional appointments in the eurozone, and represents it at the IMF, the World Bank and the G7 of finance ministers. He also chairs the Board of Governors of the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), the bailout mechanism created at the height of the crisis, which in fact financed Greece. In other words, a Greek finance minister now chairs the institution that holds a significant portion of his own country’s debt. No screenwriter would have dared write such a story of redemption ten years ago, when Alexis Tsipras and his finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, brought the land of Homer to the brink of disaster.

Awakening the Eurogroup

Pierrakakis’s goals for the Eurogroup presidency are attracting considerable interest, far beyond Athens. In Brussels, like Mario Draghi or Enrico Letta, he consistently champions the idea of a Europe genuinely without barriers, where the 27 will stop thinking in terms of national champions and instead jointly create European champions capable of channeling Europeans’ vast savings into innovation and the creation of better-paid jobs.

Pierrakakis is shaking up the usually colorless world of finance ministers with his determination, his vivid formulations, his literary references and the breadth of the issues he puts on the table for discussion.

The dossier he wants to close before the end of the year is one of the Union’s outstanding issues: the Capital Markets Union. It has been under discussion since 2015. Europe saves more than the United States, but finances its businesses less effectively. Pierrakakis adds to this agenda the need for banking integration, an extremely thorny issue, since every capital protects its banking institutions almost like sacred relics.

Proof in practice

His favorite example comes from elsewhere: telecommunications, one of the few sectors in which Europe has not fallen behind. Nokia and Ericsson continue to compete with Huawei, each accounting for roughly a quarter of the global telecommunications equipment market. But they also need to have a market commensurate with their size.

Kyriakos Pierrakakis proposes holding, across Europe, a single auction for 5G and 6G frequencies instead of 27 separate ones. He also proposes a single regulatory authority instead of a multitude of national authorities. The revenues from telecommunications spectrum auctions could thus strengthen the European budget.

He dares to put forward ideas and does not stop at words. “During our term in office, the Athens Stock Exchange joined Euronext,” he points out. “And Italy’s UniCredit acquired nearly 30% of Alpha Bank, one of the Greek banks.” “Show, don’t tell,” he likes to say, invoking William Faulkner in the way others invoke articles of the Maastricht Treaty.

Greek public services on a smartphone

Within a few months, he acquired European stature. It did not come out of nowhere. He owes it to the feats he had already undertaken in Greece. Three ministries in seven years and, each time, a taboo to overcome.

First came digital governance, from 2019 to 2023. Having joined Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s team several months before the parliamentary election victory, Pierrakakis had already worked out a state reform ready to be implemented from the first day of his ministerial tenure: a single public-services portal called “Gov.gr.” It was launched in March 2020, shortly before lockdown, initially bringing together 500 services, a number that has now exceeded 2,250. While the French were filling out their travel certificates on paper, Greeks could obtain theirs with a simple SMS.

Advice from a friend at Harvard

The achievement was as much legal as technological: enabling the state to transfer data from one public service to another without acquiring the right to read it, addressing through the institutional framework the concern over the state’s surveillance of citizens. He also secured, through legislation, an absolute veto right over the other ministries, so as to avoid the endless chain of signatures that had paralyzed the system. More the instinct of a politician than that of an engineer.

“In Greece, you can now obtain an uncontested divorce via smartphone. Quite convenient when two people can no longer stand seeing each other,” he jokes.

He had sought out a specialist at Harvard, David Yves, who now teaches in London. The Briton remembers a minister who was “resourceful, with unflagging determination” and sums up the real lesson of the Greek experience: instead of individual services, the creation of a single infrastructure, with centralized access to public data and based on the Estonian principle of “tell us once.” A revolution for the Greek state, which also helped eliminate everyday petty corruption and saved citizens countless hours by freeing them from endless queues. And all of this, David Yves points out, at exceptionally low cost.

A country coming back from afar

In March 2025, he took over the Finance Ministry. His line can be summed up in three words: “never again bailouts” and never again the humiliation of the troika. The figures he inherited reflect an impressive recovery. Public debt had peaked at close to 210% of GDP in 2020. It has now fallen to around 130%, following, among other things, the early repayment of €6.9 billion to Greece’s first European creditors. By the end of 2026, Greece may cease to be the most heavily indebted country in the eurozone, with Italy taking its place.

Unemployment, which at the height of the crisis was approaching 28%, fell to 8.2% at the end of 2025, its lowest level since 2008. The country has recorded primary surpluses every year since 2016, with the exception of the pandemic period.

Yannis Stournaras, Governor of the Bank of Greece, whose third renewal in office was proposed by Pierrakakis himself last June, describes a minister who “works through his files meticulously, inspires confidence through his knowledge and, on top of that, has a sense of humor.” For him, the contrast with the trauma of 2015 is absolute: “We had Varoufakis, who sought a head-on confrontation with the Europeans, even at the risk of taking Greece out of the euro. Pierrakakis is the exact opposite.”

Fiscal surpluses

With the finance minister, the question now is: where should the surplus in tax revenues be directed? “I don’t want [the country] to settle for stagnation; I want growth,” he says. Pierrakakis speaks of the largest tax reduction in Greece’s history.

Demographics are a standing priority for him. As early as 2016, as director of the Dianeosis think tank, he warned that Greece risked becoming “the oldest country in Old Europe.” Ten years later, he now has policy tools at his disposal: differentiated taxation depending on the number of children, age and place of residence—a reform that, he says, is “inspired by the French family model.”

Those who watch him operate in Brussels describe an unusual way of thinking, shaped by computer science and mathematics. The incident recounted in the Belgian capital concerns the succession of Luis de Guindos as vice president of the European Central Bank. For the first time there were six candidates, whereas normally consensus forms around a single name. A voting method therefore had to be devised. The process was completely closed: only the countries of the candidates would know the results of the secret ballot—and, of course, the president of the Eurogroup. In each round, everyone was free to withdraw.

“As soon as he got the result of the first round, he described to me who would withdraw, how the votes would shift and how the subsequent rounds would unfold. And that is exactly what happened,” recounts an astonished senior Council official. With a single reading, the equation with multiple unknowns had been solved.

A friend of the French

His European rise did not happen without the support of France and Germany. In the race for the Eurogroup presidency, Roland Lescure backed him against his Belgian rival, Vincent Van Peteghem, who ultimately withdrew.

This alliance is not circumstantial. “There are so many areas in which France and Greece share the same vision for Europe: technological sovereignty, European defense and, above all, the necessary Capital Markets Union,” he lists.

This ability to see the bigger picture wins him allies across political dividing lines. Aurore Lalucq, chair of the European Parliament’s Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee—and a politician of the Left—makes no secret of her esteem for him: “He thinks fast. He doesn’t speak when he has nothing to say. Above all, he thinks about what we should do, not what we can do. Naturally, I appreciate that.”

The “giant” of Patisia

“The first thing that struck me was his height. I was used to being the tallest person everywhere and suddenly I found myself standing in front of a giant,” recalls Christos Chomenidis, an Athenian writer, winner in 2021 of the European Union Prize for Literature for Niki, and one of his closest friends.

Height: 1.98 meters. “When Kyriakos is among people of ordinary stature, he is Gulliver. Gulliver among the Lilliputians.” And when he sits at the table, Gulliver becomes Gargantua. A giant who, nevertheless, never gets angry. “When he is disappointed or annoyed, he falls silent,” people around him say. “It lasts four or five hours.”

A student of the Marist Brothers at Leonteion Lyceum of Patisia, in a working-class neighborhood north of central Athens, he learned French there for two hours a day. His father, a surgeon, had attended the same school, and today his eldest of three children also attends it. Three generations in the same Marist educational tradition.

A diligent student and technology enthusiast, he took apart his first computer at the age of nine. “He was the student who was most comfortable with technology,” recalls his Greek teacher, Amalia Skoura, now the school’s principal. “He had a mobile phone with an Internet connection, which was rare at the time.” When the teacher’s connection was having problems, she would call her student at home.

At 22, he left for Cambridge, Massachusetts, and returned with two graduate degrees that would shape the entire course of his later career: one in public policy from Harvard and one in technology from MIT. Two different ways of approaching the same subject from its two ends.

Carlyle instead of Marx

Two works of science fiction serve almost as his philosophical guide. Frank Herbert’s Dune, in which a single man changes the fate of an entire galaxy, and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, in which a science of the masses predicts the future regardless of the individuals who experience it. In other words, the confrontation between Thomas Carlyle, for whom History is written by great men, and Karl Marx, for whom structures determine the course of societies.

Pierrakakis has chosen a side. “Even the smallest person can change the course of the future,” he says, borrowing the phrase from Tolkien. And he adds: “If Churchill had never been born, the outcome of the Second World War could have been different.”

The test that lies ahead

This conviction is not new. At 29, without office and without a party, he published in an Athens-based ideas magazine a review of Robert Caro’s monumental biography of Lyndon Johnson, his favorite writer, whom he considers “the Thucydides of the modern era.” There he called for Greece to have a leader who would not hesitate to get his hands dirty in an attempt to tame “the dysfunctional machine we call the Greek state.”

Fourteen years later, he is the very person who, with the wholehearted support of Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, has achieved what once seemed unimaginable.

Of course, nothing has been settled in Greece. The economy’s takeoff is being eroded by inflation, which in the spring was approaching 5.4%. The minimum wage remains below €900 gross. Pierrakakis knows full well that in the next parliamentary elections, next spring, alongside the French presidential election, the final word will not belong to the primary surplus but to the cost of living. The agricultural subsidies scandal cost the Mitsotakis government the resignations of four ministers on April 3. The European Public Prosecutor’s Office continues its investigations.

The cinephile who thinks on a grand scale

So far, everything has gone well for this 43-year-old politician passionate about cinema and literature. “Literature, cinema and politics have one thing in common. They tell stories,” he remarks.

At the top of his personal pantheon stands Stanley Kubrick—especially for Barry Lyndon—followed somewhat further back by Christopher Nolan and Denis Villeneuve. “Kubrick managed to create a masterpiece in every genre he tackled,” he explains. A career without mistakes. So far, his own career seems to be following the same pattern.