Summary Greece has already exhausted a 15-billion-euro cap on treasury bill sales.
ATHENS (AFP) - Greece could exit the euro by accident, Finance Minister Gikas Hardouvelis said Tuesday in a new warning of what could happen if anti-austerity leftist party Syriza wins the election later this month.
"An accident could happen (in a stand-off with Europe), and the whole idea is to avoid it," Hardouvelis, an economist and technocrat -- who has drawn Syriza s ire by wading into the political debate -- told Bloomberg TV.
Syriza, who are broadly expected to win snap elections on January 25, want to renegotiate Greece s EU-IMF bailout deal and write off a large portion of the country s enormous debt.
Syriza s 40-year-old leader Alexis Tsipras argues that Greece s European partners, and Germany in particular, have realised that austerity has failed and will not refuse a renegotiation.
"There is not even a chance in a million that (German Chancellor Angela) Merkel will refuse to negotiate," Tsipras told Star TV late on Monday.
The outgoing government of conservative PM Antonis Samaras says Syriza s policies are tantamount to a debt default that could cost Greece its place in the eurozone.
Hardouvelis on Tuesday noted that Greeks "cannot threaten the rest (of Europe) with our own exit".
"This is not a bargaining chip on our side... Europe has built defenses against a country leaving the euro area," he told Bloomberg.
On Monday, the finance ministry had also warned that Syriza would face a rapid cash shortage should it win the election and then challenge the country s EU-IMF creditors.
The ministry said Greece has already exhausted a 15-billion-euro (over $17-billion) cap on treasury bill sales and would need the consent of its European Union and International Monetary Fund creditors to sell more.
