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Syriza’s Tsipras unveils cabinet on course for EU collision

Ministers vow debt renegotiation — but it’s “not on EU’s radar”

GREECE’s new cabinet was unveiled by Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras yesterday — and Finance Minister Yanis Varouflakis seemed set for a collision course with the EU.

Mr Varouflakis has pledged to take on Greek oligarchs — “a network that viciously sucks the energy and the economic power from everybody else in society.” He became best known as a blogger who slammed the bailout conditions imposed by the EU, IMF and European Central Bank on the country.

Syriza’s chief economics spokesman Euclid Tsakalotos said that “nobody” believed Greece’s debts to be repayable, arguing that the EU would have to take notice of the weekend’s election result.

“It’s going to be a very funny and a very dangerous Europe with very strong centrifugal political forces if they signal that after a democratic vote they’re not interested in talking to a new government,” he told the BBC.

But European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker said any reduction in Greece’s debts was “not on the radar.”

Mr Tsipras’s most controversial appointment was to give the Defence Ministry to Independent Greeks leader Panos Kammenos.

Ministerial posts for Syriza’s coalition partner were expected, but many on the Greek left remain bewildered by the decision to hook up with Mr Kammenos — who has railed that “Buddhists, Jews and Muslims” don’t pay their taxes and in 2013 helped sponsor a Bill that would bar people who were not ethnic Greeks from serving in the military.

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