Elias Kulukundis — Tsipras and Hamlet

If it is true, as Varoufakis maintains, that at the last minute Tsipras back-tracked, it is as though Tsipras had planned a prison break, in which all the factors for success were set, but at the last moment he was not willing to run across the open ground to the wall. He called off the break after it had already started, and in the process left Varoufakis, his lieutenant in charge of the logistics, stranded.

To use another analogy, one former Minister Lafazanis might well appreciate, it was as though in October 1917, Lenin had called the Bolsheviks off the streets, left Trotsky and the Red Guards to be arrested, and gone back to the Provisional Government to negotiate a solution. Tsipras now talks of a party-wide referendum on the Eurozone's demands which may be a prelude to elections in September. We will see what the results will be, but it appears that whatever the pulse of the public may be at any given time, the long-range judgment of history should be hard on the Prime Minister. Tsipras is a clever politician who was able to ride the wave of protest a long way, but in the end he was not able to find a coherent destination, and at the present moment he is being buffeted by the waves, struggling to keep his board afloat.

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