Interview with Christine Lagarde, President of the ECB, conducted by Alexis Papahelas on 30 October

4 November 2023

When you were in Athens last week, you talked about Greece’s resilience and its phenomenal recovery capacity. Could you tell me how this happened? How did Greece become a success story?

When I look at the key performance indicators for assessing Greece’s economic and financial situation, I see improvements across the board: in employment, growth, the fiscal situation and the debt-to-GDP ratio. Greece has completed many of the reforms on its to-do list. Not all of them, of course. There is still more work to be done. I understand that there are more reforms in the pipeline but, overall, the results of the country’s efforts are impressive. And this did not go unnoticed by those whose job it is to rate an economy and assess its credit rating – as shown by the two recent decisions that raised Greece’s rating to investment grade. I think it’s a tremendous…