Going for Broke

Episode Two, Going For Broke, takes us deep inside crucial European Councils as the leaders and their Ministers try to avert financial disaster. It is a clash between the cautious Angela Merkel and the feisty Nicolas Sarkozy over how to deal with the near-bankruptcy of Greece. The crisis spreads to threaten the euro itself. It begins when Prime Minister George Papandreou comes into office to discover the disastrous state of the country’s finances. The fate of the EU’s most ambitious project, the single currency, rested on how the EU leaders dealt with the problem. The story includes the furious row between French President Nicolas Sarkozy and the head of the European Central Bank Jean-Claude Trichet, another Frenchman, over who should pay the bill. Those present also describe how President Barack Obama brought the German Chancellor to tears. It’s a story that would end, temporarily, with billions of Euros being pumped into the economy, riots against austerity, and two democratically elected Prime Ministers resigning. The crisis would explode back onto the European agenda in January 2015 with the election of the Alexis Tsipras’ radical left-wing Syriza government in Greece. With just a month before Greece again ran out of bailout money, his appointment of Marxist professor Yanis Varoufakis won Greece no friends in European capitals, especially Berlin. After receiving a bailout extension until the end of June, Alexis Tsipras shocked his fellow leaders by calling a referendum on the terms offered by the European Union. Grexit looked a real possibility, as more than 60 percent of Greeks voted against the EU’s terms. Yet instead Tsipras decided to return to Brussels to seek another bailout. With the help of French President Francois Hollande and Italian Prime Minister Italian Renzi, Alexis Tsipras faced down German Chancellor Angela Merkel and agreement was reached. Greece would remain in the Eurozone.