Greece readies itself for round of crucial talks next week
The Greek government is preparing for a special meeting of Eurozone finance ministers, having made little progress during talks with Eurozone officials this week.
The meeting, scheduled to take place on Wednesday, will focus on how to provide financial support for Athens. It comes ahead of talks between European leaders due the next day.
It will give Greece's newly elected Syriza-led government a chance to put forward its plan for its economy, while sticking to commitments made by previous governments.
However, reports from Athens suggest Greek finance minister Yanis Yaroufakis won't agree to anything that is based on the old bailout programme.
Talks conducted between Greece and a number of Eurozone leaders stalled this week, with officials struggling to agree on how best to resolve the Greek debt crisis.
A tense meeting between Greece and Germany was followed by an awkward press conference, which showed the two countries were clearly very much at loggerheads.
Varoufakis said: "[Germany] must be proud of the fact that Nazism has been eradicated", adding "when I return home I shall find myself in a parliament in which the third-largest party is not a neo-Nazi party, it is a Nazi party,” in reference to Golden Dawn.
“We need the people of Germany to help us in the struggle against misanthropy."
It later transpired that Varoufakis and his counterpart German finance minister Wolfgang Schauble drew very different conclusions from the negotiations.
Schauble said the pair had “agreed to disagree”, while Varoufakis said they hadn’t agreed anything – not even to disagree.