In an opinion article published in Politico, European parliamentary group leader for the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe and former prime minister of Belgium, Guy Verhofstadt, writes that the Greek "conundrum" is a shared responsibility. On the one hand, Greeks never made a real reform package or a clear break with their mistakes from the past; on the other, Europe has followed wrong policies - policies of pure accountancy that slowly but steadily choked the Greek economy. To make matters worse, now that everyone – even the International Monetary Fund - realizes that though these policy choices were wrong, we have been clinging to them:

"We claim we have saved Greece by handing it a multi-billion euro rescue package. In reality, we have burdened the country with a lot of unsustainable debt. We need to use this crisis to create a structural solution, one that eliminates the risk that erodes the stability of our European economy, day after day," Verhofstadt underlines.

Discussing the same issue, Professor Zoltán Pogátsa, from the University of Western Hungary, writes in an open letter to the Eurozone states of the former Eastern bloc, which, as he writes “have been duped by the major powers into firmly opposing Greece.” He argues that the generally held view that “Athens is damaging to their economies” is a deception, as “Eastern Eurozone members’ money never actually went to Greece, but to Brussels, in order to support the euro.”

Specifically, he writes “your money wasn’t actually used to bail out Greece…over 90% of the money you sent to Greece bounced back immediately in the form of interest payments, in order to keep the Eurozone solvent.” Meanwhile, the enormous austerity programme, imposed on Greece - far bigger than in any other country - led unemployment to hit a quarter of its population and half of its youth.