This talk examines elite European discourses during the Greek financial crisis from its pre‐history in September 2008 up to the arrival of the SYRIZA government in January 2015. Having coded 1,153 unique quotes drawn from a dataset of 15,354 news wires from Reuters, it argues that the communicative discourse of 63 senior European (and IMF) officials on the Greek crisis during that period demonstrated significant volatility. Four distinct narrative frames are identified: ‘neglect’, ‘suspicious cooperation’, ‘blame’ and ‘reluctant redemption’, punctuated by three discursive junctures in 2010, 2011 and 2012, which reflect the content of the changing communicative discourse of the Greek crisis.