(MENAFN- AFP) Greece's new government began a search for European allies Saturday in its bid to renegotiate its loans and end austerity, but German Chancellor Angela Merkel once again ruled out debt relief for Athens.
Radical Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and his maverick Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis are reaching out to France and Italy, whose centre-left governments are most likely to sympathise with its determination to end painful reforms.
Varoufakis will head to Paris late Saturday and meet with French ministers on Sunday, aides said, bringing forward a European tour that was due to start in London on Monday.
Tsipras is due to meet his Italian and French counterparts Matteo Renzi and Francois Hollande on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Predictably, neither tour includes Germany, which has shouldered the bulk of Greece's loans and where officials have already expressed outrage at the new Greek government's plans to renegotiate its bailout package.
Merkel on Saturday ruled out fresh debt relief for Greece, telling the Hamburger Abendblatt daily: "There has already been voluntary debt forgiveness by private creditors, banks have already slashed billions from Greece's debt."
"I do not envisage fresh debt cancellation," she said, while a new poll for broadcaster ZDF found 76 percent of Germans oppose any reduction in debt.
The Greek government, led by Tsipras's hard left party Syriza, has pledged to rip up the terms of the EU-IMF rescue package that helped Greece avoid a financial meltdown in 2010, and to erase half the country's debt.
In its first week in power, it scrapped the privatisation of the country's two main ports and the state power company and announced a major raise in the minimum wage.
Despite a restructuring in 2012, Greece is still lumbered with a debt pile of more than 315 billion euros, upwards of 175 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), a record for the EU.
- 'A few short weeks' -
Tsipras and Varoufakis held their first talks with Greece's international creditors in Athens on Friday, in a strained meeting with Jeroen Dijsselbloem, who represents finance ministers from the 19-nation eurozone.
Tsipras reportedly told the Dutchman that the austerity plan enforced as a condition of the multi-billion-euro loans from the European Union and International Monetary Fund "had failed" and had been "rejected" by the Greek people.
Varoufakis went further, saying Greece wanted direct access to its EU-IMF creditors and would no longer work with their widely hated fiscal audit staff team, known as the "troika".
In an interview with the BBC afterwards, he added: "What we are asking our partners for is a few short weeks during which we can put together very sensible, rational proposals... to minimise the cost of this crisis for the average European citizen."
Dijsselbloem warned Athens that "taking unilateral steps or ignoring previous arrangements is not the way forward".
Greece had been promised another 7.2 billion euros ($8.1 billion) in funds from the EU, IMF and European Central Bank if it completed specific reforms by February 28.
Varoufakis has said his government does not want the loans, instead preferring to rethink the entire bailout programme, but there are concerns Greece cannot survive without them.
The previous Greek finance minister Gikas Hardouvelis had said the country could manage without new loans until March, but Theodore Pelagidis, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said a crunch could come as early as next month.
Credit rating agency Standard & Poor's on Friday warned that Greece's banks, which are helping the state stay afloat by purchasing its treasury bills, would soon struggle with their liquidity.
Alexandre Delaigue, economics professor at the elite French military academy Saint-Cyr, said the prospect that Greece would be forced out of the eurozone had come a step closer.
"A solution where everybody saves face seems to be getting further away," he told AFP, adding: "The possibility of a Grexit has increased."
- Shockwaves through Europe -
The stunning success of Syriza in last Sunday's polls sent shockwaves through Europe and gave encouragement to other anti-austerity parties.
Tens of thousands of people took to the streets of Madrid on Saturday in support of the Spanish party Podemos, which has been surging in polls ahead of elections later this year.
Like Syriza, Podemos has found popular support by targeting corruption and rejecting austerity programmes aimed at lifting the countries out of deep economic crisis.
In Portugal, which received a bailout and also has its own anti-austerity party, Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho said he would oppose any renegotiation of Greece's debt.
Greek stocks have taken a battering this week and yields on Athens 10-year bonds rose above 10 percent, a sign that jittery investors are losing confidence.
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