Greece, once on the brink of ejection from the eurozone, secured the leadership of the powerful Eurogroup on Thursday as Finance Minister Kyriakos Pierrakakis won a two-way contest to chair the forum of eurozone finance ministers, POLITICO reported.
Pierrakakis defeated Belgian Deputy Prime Minister Vincent Van Peteghem, overcoming expectations that the more experienced Belgian would take the post. The Eurogroup, although informal, played a crucial role during the eurozone’s sovereign debt crisis a decade ago, when Greece required three international bailouts.
In a statement cited by POLITICO, Pierrakakis said his generation had been “shaped by an existential crisis that revealed the power of resilience, the cost of complacency, the necessity of reform, and the strategic importance of European solidarity.”
Greece has since slashed its debt to roughly 147% of GDP, still the highest in the eurozone but far below crisis-era levels.
POLITICO reported that Van Peteghem’s defeat was partly due to Belgium’s reluctance to support the European Commission’s plan to use the cash returns from frozen Russian assets to finance a €165 billion reparations loan for Ukraine.
Pierrakakis, 42, is not a conventional figure within Greece’s ruling centre-right New Democracy party. A former advisor to the socialist PASOK party, he studied at Harvard and MIT and previously negotiated with Greece’s creditors during the crisis. He later became minister for digital governance, where he spearheaded the country’s digital transformation and became one of the cabinet’s most popular figures.
After New Democracy’s re-election in 2023, he served as education minister, backing legislation to allow private universities. He moved to the finance ministry in March, accelerating debt-reduction plans and pledging to bring Greece’s debt below 120% of GDP by 2030.