Proposals

Former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has revealed the name of the political party he is forming in Greece.

He wrote on his personal website that the party will be called MeRA25 (an acronym for European Realist Disobedience Front), which will be an offshoot of the pan-European movement DiEM25, which he helped set up.

The Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25), founded by former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, has started a crowdfunding campaign ahead of launching a fully-fledged Greek political party on March 26.

The first line of the TurkStream natural gas project will reach the Turkish shore in May of this year and will be in service at the end of 2019, the project management team told state-run Anadolu Agency in an exclusive interview on Jan. 5.

Greece's controversial former minister of finance and founder of the Democracy in Europe 2025 (Diem25) movement, is scheduled to speak in the western port city of Patra on Monday.

Varoufakis will present his proposal for the way forward for Greece, including the creation of a state fund to manage nonperforming loans.

Inaugurating the Thessaloniki International Fair on Saturday night, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras declared that "Greece is turning a page," and that had moved from "Grexit" - the risk of exiting the Eurozone - to "Grinvest" as investor interest grows.

Former energy minister Panayotis Lafazanis, who left SYRIZA in the summer of 2015 to set up a new leftist, pro-drachma party, said on Saturday that when he was in government he agreed with Moscow that Russia would make a downpayment for a gas pipeline so the money could be used to finance Greece if it left the euro.

Greece is expected to return to the bond markets in 2018, but having secured its third bailout program Athens may test the waters by issuing a new bond as early as July 17.     

Greek newspapers have been speculating that a bond market test could come in "a matter of days."

Unnecessary political clashes prevented Greece from emerging from its financial crisis like other countries, former European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso has told Sunday's Kathimerini in an interview, adding that he does not expect a debt relief settlement until after German elections in September.

At an event in Hamburg in February 2016, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble mentioned the suggestion he had offered Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos in 2011 for a short-term Grexit. Schaeuble's rationale, among others, is that exiting the euro would allow the country to depreciate its currency.

The EU must reform or it could face "Frexit," French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron has said.

The pro-European candidate, who is expected to "defend European values," spoke for BBC at the start of the last week of campaigning ahead of the runoff against extreme right candidate Marine le Pen.