I’ll tell you the parable of Tsipras
Alexis Tsipras has bequeathed Greece rubble and will still be able to do damage because his exit from the scene is certainly not definitive. But it is still an exit from the scene which as such deserves the honor of arms
Saturday 8 July ends, with the vote on confidence in the government, the start-up phase of the new Greek parliament following the elections of 25 June which recorded the confirmation of the victory of the Nea Dimokratia party, already obtained with the first round 35 days earlier, insufficient to guarantee Kyriakos Mitsotakis a parliamentary majority.
So far the no news. The real news of the debate on trust is that, for the first time in eleven years, it was not Alexis Tsipras who stood up to speak after the programmatic declarations of the prime minister (Mitsotakis in fact) but a gray party bureaucrat, Sokratis Famellos, who became meanwhile "transitional" president of Syriza after the unexpected resignation of Alexis.
I find it singular, even a sign of ingratitude, the circumstance that only the Foglio and the Manifesto dedicated a few millimetres/columns of their front page to the news of the resignation submitted without notice and in solitude by Alexis Tsipras on Thursday 29 June, three days after the Syriza's latest electoral defeat. Tsipras's is a piece of European history of at least the last ten years (and it is not said that it is already a piece to be archived because even in leaving the scene, after three days of "absolute" isolation, he proved to be the great actor and at the same time at the same time the great director of his career that we have known).
If I speak of the ingratitude of the media, I am referring to the fact that for years Tsipras has generously offered material, ideas and opportunities to a star system, the one cultivated by political journalism, plethoric and always exposed to the risk of treading water in the mortar. Tsipras has not been water, neither fresh nor heated, I say this for having followed his deeds with a certain attention for at least ten years, with curiosity and initially with some expectation, during his uninterrupted electoral campaign, from the electoral triumph of May 2012 when Syriza quadrupled in votes and seats in Parliament, with 52 seats making it the "official opposition" party to Antoni Samaras' Nea Dimokratia, until the definitive affirmation in January 2015 that with 36% of the votes and 149 seats, two less than the absolute majority, nonetheless made him the youngest prime minister in the almost two-century-old history of the Greek state: thanks to the support, never lacking in the following four and a half years, of a small ultra-nationalist right-wing party, that of the "Greeks Independents” by Panos Kamenos.
Pure Milazism, to use a term that only the elderly know. By then any expectation of Tsipras, at least for me, had vanished: it was clear that he was a pure populist-minded leader who as such had nothing useful to offer a slaughtered country other than targets for so-called popular anger.
In those two and a half abundant years, the young emerging leader had distributed countless declarations to every possible recipient, sipping calm words from the podium of a forum organized in Athens by the Economist and tirelessly shouting "go home kyria Merkel" in the crowded squares of potential voters eager to smash any symbol of the hated Troika or its alleged local accomplices. Without ever, literally never, a sentence that contained even a modest but tangible position on a concrete issue: countless declarations on any topic, but none that even vaguely alluded to political choices, positions that risked alienating even a negligible fraction of the electorate, at most adherence to the trendiest slogans. Only proactive was an indiscriminate and obviously unachievable extremist refusal of the policies imposed by the Eurogroup and the ECB to keep under control the abyss that had opened up in the public accounts gradually starting from Greece's entry into the Euro (and also because of this ) but which had been "discovered" only years after the outbreak, in September 2008, of the financial crisis prepared in previous years by the American subprime bubble.
In the meantime, "Alexis" had become a character throughout Europe, to the point that despite the categorical refusal of all the policies imposed by the Troika (IMF, ECB and the EU Commission-Eurogroup) or perhaps precisely thanks to this refusal, in view of the elections to the European Parliament in May 2014, on the initiative of the Italian journalist Barbara Spinelli, daughter of Altiero, one of the noble fathers of post-war Europeanism and co-author of the Ventotene Manifesto, a "Lista Tsipras" was launched in Italy which had brought in Strasbourg three parliamentarians, exceeding the non-negligible threshold of 4%.
At the highest point, at least in spectacular terms, of his parabola, with an effrontery such as not to arouse even indignation but only admiring amazement, on June 26, 2015, in a manner worthy of a South American caudillo, he announced, with a week's notice (the minimum material time to print the ballot papers, where the « NO » was printed before the « YES »), a referendum on a literally incomprehensible question preceded by a proclamation asking the Greek people if they intended to suffer a "blackmailing ultimatum which proposes that we accept a severe and humiliating austerity with no end and no prospects of recovery" and invited the people themselves to "respond in a sovereign and proud way, as the history of the Greeks teaches" adding that "we respond to despotism and persecutory austerity with democracy, coolness and determination”. Except, three days before the vote, stating that the "yes" did not automatically entail Greece's exit from the euro.
The "NO" demanded by Tsipras on 5 July 2015 was pronounced, with the invoked "proudness", by a majority exceeding 60%, but this did not prevent Tsipras himself from rushing to Brussels in the following days where, after the "marathon negotiation" (a dramaturgical genre of which they are masters in those parts) the "fierce no" was transformed into a compound "yes" after four years of the worst austerity that Greece had experienced since the "technical government" of Loukas Papadimos in 2011, with blocking of private banking funds and with primary budget surpluses of 4-5%.
But that July 5th, in order not to miss what was considered a historic day, Beppe Grillo also rushed to Athens, and we are talking about the Grillo of 2015 who could afford to dishonor anyone, receiving only applause in return and was preparing to invade Parliament with its followers to open it "like a can of tuna" as happened (opening of the can separately) with the elections of March 2018.
This brings us to the famous "kolotoumba" (somersault) of Tsipras, as it was immediately christened. But it is not the fact that, after calling and winning an incendiary referendum that was supposed to take Greece out of the euro, Tsipras rushed to Brussels to place himself under the protection of Jean-Claude Juncker, Angela Merkel and François Hollande with the decisive support , from across the Atlantic, of the Obama administration, which must surprise: at that moment Tsipras – who certainly did not intend to sacrifice a promising political career – had no alternatives. In the previous six months, once again with great talent and with the generous support of the European media, he had staged a real war against the Brussels institutions, leaving room for duels between Yanis Varoufakis and the then president of the Eurogroup Jeroen Dijsselbloem, a Dutchman who for five consecutive months had exposed himself to the ridicule that « Yanis » administered to him, declined in the most creative forms, including a long letter on headed paper from the Greek Ministry of the Economy where he explained in great detail the techniques devised to deal with the chronic problem of tax evasion: legions of agents recruited from among tourists who, armed with micro-cameras, would go to taverns and various places of paid entertainment in the summer months to catch those who did not issue a receipt in the act). He had allowed that while the Troika representatives were waiting for his delegates for a meeting already agreed in Brussels, the latter let themselves be caught having fun in a restaurant in the Belgian capital. But, after having exhausted all possible provocations, Tsipras had no choice but to give in: a tactic that had cost Greece, according to calculations at the time, at least 100 billion euros more, but which allowed Alexis to repeat to his voters: "In the end, to save the country, I had to back down, but you saw that I surrendered only after fighting to the end." If then it were true, at least in part, that Tsipras had initially overestimated his own strength, if it were true it would only confirm the judgment that will follow.
What still justifies admiring amazement today is the fact that only three months after having effectively reneged on his entire policy, in September 2015 Tsipras managed to win the elections once again, necessarily anticipated to get rid of almost a third of his parliamentarians that they had taken seriously the program on which they were elected: in all, in September, it won 145 seats, four less than in January, a trifle. After that he governed, in the populist way, i.e. having the consent of the electorate as his only guiding star and scrupulously respecting the indications of those who had "saved" him after the last bluff: the EU, understood as the European Commission and as France and Germany (on whose behalf he shamelessly squeezed the Greek taxpayers, but he did so without changing their daily habits), and, last but not least, America to which, albeit in embarrassing ways, he brought They marked the end of a thirty-year dispute over the denomination of the northern territories of Macedonia (formerly one of the states of the Yugoslav federation) which had prevented the entry of these territories (today "Northern Macedonia") into NATO. A year after a fire that had exposed the state of abandonment of the fire and rescue services causing 104 deaths trapped between the front of the fire that descended from the mountains, and the seafront, in an area of villas for the weekend , the elections had been held: Syriza had lost them, but retaining an electorate of 35%, an exceptional result after four years of bad governance.
Tsipras is a "left" populist, he differs from the "right" populist because while the latter usually combines the desire to give voice to the will of "the" people with the desire to pursue the good of the nation. The former floats in the river of progress that flows in the boundless banks of natural solidarity among men, and this dispenses it from the political costs that the claim to solve some concrete problem of a country always entails. But when we say "populist" we don't just mean a demagogue. Tsipras has shown over the years that he is not only a great technician of consensus but also of power, in all its forms: relations with the protecting powers, with internal powers starting with the media system but not only, great creativity in enhancing any crack in the opposing alignments, as he did during the years of his government by making a tacit but iron pact with Mitsotakis' predecessor both in the presidency of Nea Dimokratia and in government, Kostas Karamanlis. Unprejudiced beyond imagination.
Tsipras is and remains an extremely talented political leader, especially in this Europe where the daily life of citizens is taught by the dull bureaucracy of Brussels and their future is decided elsewhere. Of course, a political leader who is the son of an average building contractor from the time of the colonels, who unlike Mitsotakis cannot allow himself, not even a little, the luxury of engaging in politics for glory. Now it will probably be better for him to continue managing his own political career from behind the curtain. Alexis Tsipras bequeathed to Greece, in July 2019, rubble and will still be able to do damage because his exit from the scene is certainly not definitive. But it is still an exit from the scene which as such deserves the honor of arms. Chapeau-bas to a political leader of the first magnitude these days.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/vi-racconto-la-parabola-di-tsipras/ on Sun, 09 Jul 2023 06:30:16 +0000.