Wolfgang Schaeuble in a statement he made just before the upcoming Euroworking Group he ruled out the possibility of a haircut of the Greek debt. He underscored that something like this would have been a violation of the Lisbon Treaty. As he said, something like that could take place only if Greece was not inside the Eurozone.

“We must continue to push Greece to make reforms in order to become competitive. Otherwise the country will have to leave the Eurozone”, he stated.

In the same time the German press attacks Schaeuble accusing him of behaving like a dictator. More specifically, Tageszeitung argues that although the German Minister of Finance knows that the measures he wants Greece to take don’t work, he chooses to ignore this reality. The newspaper says that Greece turns into a German colony and while Schaeuble’s hard behavior may be appealing to the German voters, the impression the rest of Europe has is that Germany becomes an unreasonable overlord tortures mercilessly the weaker countries, something that Germany will eventually pay for.