German officials rushed to calm highly stressed markets yesterday, insisting Greece should stay in the eurozone, amid rising alarm that Germany is losing patience with Athens and its budget drama.

A raft of comments by senior German politicians raising the spectre of an “orderly default” for Greece and even an ignominious eurozone exit sent the euro to a 10-year low as traders worried the debt crisis was worsening.

But a spokesman for Germany’s Economy Minister Phil-ipp Roesler, who is also vice chancellor, sought to allay these fears, saying: “Our common goal is the stability of the euro and we want Greece to stay in the euro.”

At the same news conference, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spo-kesman said that Germany “ass-umes that Greece is doing everything it can” to implement strict austerity measures to battle its deficit woes. “Our goal is quite clear: We want to stabilise the eurozone as a whole,” Steffen Seibert said. After a meeting between Ms Merkel and European Commission President José Manuel Barroso, the two leaders issued a statement saying they were “agreed on the overwhelming importance of the euro for Europe and Germany. Stability and growth in euro countries are the decisive pre-conditions for a stable euro,” the pair said, according to a statement issued by the German government.

Mr Roesler himself had contributed to the market fears by writing in an opinion article in yesterday’s edition of the conservative Die Welt daily that Europe could no longer rule out an “orderly default” for Greece.

“To stabilise the euro, we must not take anything off the table in the short run,” Mr Roesler wrote.

Also fanning the flames were comments by the general secretary of the Free Democrats, junior coalition partners in Berlin, suggesting that Greece’s euro membership was in doubt.

“The Greeks must decide themselves whether they want to stay in the euro or not, it should not be a taboo,” Christian Lindner told ARD television.

“Rumours are spreading that the German government is hoping to end the Greece aid.

“It is tempting to believe these rumours, as everything seems to fit,” according to Ulrich Leuchtmann, an analyst at Comme-rzbank.

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.