ATHENS — The country that almost got kicked out of the eurozone is now running the powerful EU body that rescued it from bankruptcy.

Greece’s finance minister, Kyriakos Pierrakakis, on Thursday beat Belgian Deputy Prime Minister Vincent Van Peteghem in a two-horse race for the Eurogroup presidency. Although an informal forum for eurozone finance ministers, the post has proved pivotal in overcoming crises — notably the sovereign debt crisis, which resulted in three bailouts of the Greek government.

That was 10 years ago, when Pierrakakis’ predecessor described the Eurogroup as a place fit only for psychopaths. Today, Athens presents itself as a poster child of fiscal prudence after dramatically reducing its debt pile to around 147 percent of its economic output — albeit still the highest tally in the eurozone.

“My generation was shaped by an existential crisis that revealed the power of resilience, the cost of complacency, the necessity of reform, and the strategic importance of European solidarity,” Pierrakakis wrote in his motivational letter for the job. “Our story is not only national; it is deeply European.”

Few diplomats initially expected the 42-year-old computer scientist and political economist to win the race to lead the Eurogroup after incumbent Paschal Donohoe’s shock resignation last month. Belgium’s Van Peteghem could boast more experience and held a great deal of respect within the eurozone, setting him up as the early favorite to win.

But Belgium’s continued reluctance to back the European Commission’s bid to use the cash value of frozen Russian assets to finance a €165 billion reparations loan to Ukraine ultimately contributed to Van Peteghem’s defeat.

Not typical

Pierrakakis isn’t a typical member of the center-right ruling New Democracy party, which belongs to the European People’s Party. His political background is a socialist one, having served as an advisor to the centre-left PASOK party from 2009, when Greece plunged into financial crisis. He was even one of the Greek technocrats negotiating with the country’s creditors.

The Harvard and MIT graduate joined New Democracy to support Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’ bid for the party leadership in 2015, because he felt that they shared a political vision.

Pierrakakis got his big political break when New Democracy won the national election in 2019, after four years of serving as a director of the research and policy institute diaNEOsis. He was named minister of digital governance, overseeing Greece’s efforts to modernize the country’s creaking bureaucracy, adopting digital solutions for everything from Cabinet meetings to medical prescriptions.

Those efforts made him one of the most popular ministers in the Greek cabinet — so much so that Pierrakakis is often touted as Mitsotakis’ likely successor for the party leadership in the Greek press.

After the re-election of New Democracy in 2023, Pierrakakis took over the Education Ministry, where he backed controversial legislation that paved the way for the establishment of private universities in Greece.

A Cabinet reshuffle in March placed him within the finance ministry, where he has sped up plans to pay down Greece’s debt to creditors and pledged to bring the country’s debt below 120 percent of GDP before 2030.