Give us back the drachma, Brussels told

GreeCe should ditch the euro as it emerges from eight years of austerity caused by punishing eU bailouts, a controversial former minister said yesterday.

the country should also have been allowed to go bankrupt at the height of the eurozone crisis instead of being forced into a strict rescue package dictated by Brussels, said yanis Varoufakis, who served in the Left-wing syriza government.

He claimed the eU pushed the country into accepting massive loans to save German and French banks from collapse. and the 57-year-old accused Greece’s creditors of turning it into a ‘dead colony’ that had been left devastated by austerity, with citizens enduring years of ‘pain and misery’.

His comments came as the country exited the final stage of an eight-year, £258billion bailout programme, which has left Greece crippled by soaring unemployment.

Mr Varoufakis told German newspaper Bild: ‘What has really changed? Greece’s state debts have not become lower, but higher. the state is still broke, private citizens have become poorer, companies still go bankrupt, and our gross national product has decreased by 25 per cent.

‘the [bailout] was intended only for German and French banks who had, against logic, loaned a lot of money to the Greek state and oligarchy. as for the Greek banks and state, they should not have been saved. We should have been allowed to go bankrupt, suffer the consequences but then be allowed to pick ourselves up and move on – something these bailouts prohibited.

‘the normal Greek… only saw pain and misery in the past decade.’ In another television interview, he said it was ‘absolutely necessary that the country be predropped pared to return to its national currency’. Unable to pay its debts, Greece faced a so-called ‘Grexit’ from the eurozone in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008. the economy has now returned to modest growth, but one in five Greeks are unemployed, average incomes have by a more than a third and taxes have rocketed.

Critics have argued that Greece would have fared better outside the euro, enabling it to carry out a range of measures including devaluing its currency and lowering interest rates to make the economy more competitive.

yesterday leading eU figures tried to paint the bailout programme as a success, with european Council president donald tusk tweeting: ‘you did it! With huge efforts and european solidarity you seized the day.’

Mr Varoufakis told BBC’s today programme: ‘to quote tacitus, “they made a desert and called it peace,” they have put Greece into a permanent coma and they call it stability.’

‘Only pain and misery’