Greek deputy foreign minister Euclid Tsakalotos replaced finance minister Yanis Varoufakis as head of the Greek debt negotiations.
Tsakalotos was present on Thursday night’s three-way meeting between the leaders of Germany, France and Greece. According to sources the German chancellor noted that Mr. Tsakalotos speaks English so well that it is almost impossible to detect by his accent that he not a native speaker.
55-year-old Tsakalotos was born in Rotterdam,Holland and raised in the UK. He studied politics, philosophy and economics at the universities of Oxford, and then Sussex, before completing his PhD in 1989 at Oxford.
He taught at the University of Kent between October 1990 and June 1993, as well as the Athens University of Economics and Business between October 1994 and September 2010. He has authored or co-edited several books, including Crucible of Resistance: Greece, the Eurozone and the World Economic Crisis, as well as published numerous articles.
Tsakalotos, a close confidante of leader Alexis Tsipras, has been a member of Syriza for nearly a decade as he was elected to the Greek Parliament in the May 2012 elections.
The Guardian describes him as “amiable, low-key and professorial, the embodiment of the academic he has been for the past 30 years. It is a world away from untrammeled narcissism, of which the maverick finance minister has been accused”.