Resisting the tide
Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has been caught in a trap of his own making for a while now. Even if he truly wanted a deal, it’s hard for anyone to see how he could achieve it. Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis is not willing to negotiate, but instead is doing everything in his power to prevent a deal. The minister is burning bridges, developing rivals and raising the bar extremely high. While Tsipras didn’t always follow him in the past, the premier now appears to fully embrace the Varoufakis dogma. The game theory will be put to the test until the very end. It’s difficult for Tsipras to back down and accept a deal without his minister’s seal of approval.
Wednesday is also the first of two days in which a Parliament debt audit commission is set to announce its preliminary findings, in the prime minister’s presence. I’m not aware of the report’s contents, but it will most probably declare a large portion of the country’s debt to be illegal. There will be a substantial political impact, which will further reduce the premier’s room for maneuver.
A powerful team of SYRIZA party officials and opinion leaders will then ask, “Why is the government negotiating given that the debt is far lower than what creditors are claiming?”
Varoufakis, House Speaker Zoe Constantopoulou and many others, all acting on their own motives, have led Tsipras to the edge. Besides, the premier is a keen reader of opinion polls. In these readings he observes two things opposing the achievement of any rational agreement. Firstly, 25 to 30 percent of respondents are in favor of a rift and possibly a return to the drachma. This might not constitute a majority, but it does points to a sizable political clientele. The second finding is even more worrisome: When it comes to SYRIZA voters, the choice of a rift is clearly predominant.
By now Tsipras has a good picture of the kind of deal he could achieve through “orthodox” European negotiating. Obviously, he is afraid that if he presented this to the House the issue would be much greater than losing 10 to 20 deputies. For him, the danger would be losing the majority of SYRIZA supporters and pushing the rift clientele into the arms of his current comrades who would like to go their own way.
The European and Greek elites tried to persuade him that none of that mattered, that he would develop a new center-left and that the support earned would be greater than that lost. It’s difficult to ask a man to dive into uncharted waters and test new comrades, alliances and tactics. Tsipras was unable to tame the extremist and unpredictable factors around him, something which should have been done earlier.
There are those who believe that he didn’t actually want to tame them, others that he couldn’t bear to do it. Whatever the truth, the tide is almost invincible and will lead him, along with the entire country, into uncharted waters.
