Tsipras against “The game is over”: the first revelations from the book “Ithaca”

Alexis Tsipras in the first published excerpt from the book “Ithaca” tells how he came to the decision to referendum in 2015 and what political minefield they had to go through after the plebiscite was announced.

The fragment that was published is taken from the chapter “The Hour of Decisions” and describes his tough dialogue with the President of the European Council Donald Tuskwhich began with the phrase “The game is over.”

“The game is over”: the moment when rage boiled

According to Tsiprasduring a meeting of the European summit Donald Tusk with a tone “between determination and rudeness,” he took the floor at the very beginning and solemnly declared: “The game is over.” The former Greek prime minister admits that at that moment he felt overwhelmed with rage: he saw the leader of European institutions describing the drama as a “game” Greek peoplewho has been living under memoranda and austerity.

He recalls thinking not only as a politician, but also as a simple Greek: his country, with all its mistakes, had never raised a moralizing finger against any European nation. It was all the more strange to hear such a tone from a representative of a country that Greece once supported on the way to European Union. Then, according to the author, he replied Tusk in the tone that his statement deserved.

“I told him that he has no right to call negotiations on which the life of an entire people depends a “game.” “This is not a game. The whole country is hanging by a thread”– recalls Tsipras. An additional irritant was that the draft final statement of the summit included language as if it had already been achieved agreementwhile in reality Athens was presented with harsh ultimatum.

Referendum as a “shield” and the last political weapon

It was at this moment, he writes Tsiprashe realized that referendum will not be simply a technical tool for approving or rejecting government decisions. He saw it as a “shield for the country itself,” a way to make partners understand that they were not facing a cabinet exhausted by months of negotiations, ready to capitulate, but an entire people.

According to his interpretation, creditors had to make a choice: if they wanted to continue to put pressure on Athens, regardless of the consequences, they would have to openly challenge not only a specific government, but also democracy And popular sovereignty in a European country that is historically considered the “cradle of democracy”.

Tsipras emphasizes that the decision on the referendum was his personal, deeply thought-out and psychologically difficult initiative: “I suffered for a long time with this decision – both in my mind and in my heart. It was a choice with logic and with democratic sensitivity” He was the first to tell his closest associates about it, explaining that the problem was of a political nature: “We could not agree to what was demanded of us, not because we didn’t want to, but because it meant the humiliation of the people and our political disappearance.”

At the same time, he describes himself as a person who is far from making impulsive steps: he carefully thinks about every decision and “suffers” over the details. However, he clearly understood the price of the upcoming choice: pressure, attacks, attempts at political and media “disintegration” not only of himself, but of the entire country.

“We have no leverage, only the moral advantage remains”

The excerpt details a closed meeting of the negotiating team and delegation members at The Hotel in Brussels. According to the story Tsiprasthe meeting began with a request to remove mobile phones from the hall due to the threat of wiretapping. After this, he announced his plan:

“I propose going to a referendum. There is no other way out”he said. The argument was simple: no discussion Greek debt the partners did not want to allow it, but put forward only demands, which he interprets as an attempt to “finish off” the government and humiliate the country.

The idea was to bring the ultimatum to Athens and put it before the people. When asked by his colleagues about his goal, he replied: “The goal is to win the referendum. Force the partners, under pressure from international public opinion, to back down and return to the negotiating table with a new, viable and reasonable proposal.”. According to him, traditional pressure levers ran out, and the only remaining weapons were moral superiority – the image of a country that refuses to sign its own humiliation and asks for the will of its citizens.

Politics against privacy: son’s forgotten birthday

At the end of the passage Tsipras takes the reader to Athens, where on the same day an emergency meeting of the Government Council was convened in Maxim. He describes the atmosphere as “another world” – tough, demanding, completely consuming. In this world, he admits, he even forgot about the birthday of his youngest son Orpheus.

Lost in fear information leaks and focused on preparing the announcement of the referendum, the prime minister did not answer his wife’s calls and refused to interrupt the meeting when she came to the building. Only when his wife showed through the slightly open door a bag with three small cake candles did he realize that he had completely “fallen out” of family reality. He cites this episode as a symbol of the personal price he had to pay in making the fateful decision on the referendum.

As he emphasizes Alexis Tsiprashe was confident that he was acting correctly for the sake of the people, who should not be a “guinea pig” for Brussels technocrats. But at the same time, he understood that the consequences of this choice would haunt him and the country for many years to come.

Source link