Headlines
Greek minister heads Eurogroup, marking turnaround from years of crisis
Published by Global Banking and Finance Review
Posted on December 11, 2025
3 min readLast updated: January 20, 2026
Global Banking and Finance Review
Company
Published by Global Banking and Finance Review
Posted on December 11, 2025
3 min readLast updated: January 20, 2026
Kyriakos Pierrakakis, Greece's finance minister, becomes Eurogroup president, highlighting Greece's economic recovery from past crises.
By Sudip Kar-Gupta and Lefteris Papadimas
BRUSSELS, Dec 11 (Reuters) - Greece's finance minister was on Thursday named head of the Eurogroup, the body that helps shape euro zone policy, underlining his country's turnaround since the years when it came close to crashing out of the single currency.
Kyriakos Pierrakakis saw off the rival Belgian candidate to become president of the assembly of finance ministers from the 20 countries sharing the euro.
Greece had to be bailed out three times between 2010 and 2015 by euro zone governments to avoid economic collapse after years of excessive borrowing and overspending.
It now has steady economic growth above 2%, the highest investment rates in the euro zone, budget surpluses and public debt that, though still the highest in Europe, has been falling quickly for years.
"This election is an important symbolic moment for Greece and the euro area: we all remember the deep financial crisis that Greece had to go through and even questions were raised about Greece's continued membership in the euro area," European Economic Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis told a news conference.
"Now we see a remarkable turnaround with Greece being among the euro area's best performing economies with a fiscal surplus and now with a Greek finance minister as the president of the Eurogroup," he said.
The Eurogroup gathers finance ministers of the 20 countries sharing the EU's single currency who meet once a month ahead of the bigger, formal talks of all 27 EU finance ministers to discuss issues related to the euro, and the euro zone economy.
The 42-year-old computer scientist will also represent the single-currency area at G7 finance ministers' meetings, shape the agenda of the monthly meetings and seek to work out compromises and common positions.
"Greece has come such a long way in the past 10 years," European Council President Antonio Costa said on X.
"Your election today as President of the Eurogroup, dear Kyriakos Pierrakakis, is a meaningful recognition of that progress, both for your country and for our Union," he said.
Pierrakakis had been vying for the post with Belgium's deputy prime minister, Vincent Van Peteghem, since Paschal Donohoe resigned as Irish finance minister and Eurogroup President to take up a senior World Bank role.
He became Greek finance minister earlier this year.
In his previous role as digital governance minister of the centre-right government of Kyriakos Mitsotakis between 2019 -2023, he spearheaded the digitization of the state as Greece recovered from the 2009-2018 debt crisis.
Pierrakakis will take office on December 12 and serve a two-and-a-half-year term.
(Reporting by Sudip Kar-Gupta, Writing by Jan Strupczewski; Editing by Benoit Van Overstraeten and Andrew Heavens)
The Eurogroup is an informal body composed of the finance ministers of the Eurozone countries, responsible for discussing and coordinating economic policies within the Euro area.
A financial crisis is a situation in which the value of financial institutions or assets drops rapidly, often leading to widespread economic instability.
Economic growth refers to an increase in the production of goods and services in an economy over a period of time, typically measured by GDP.
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