The recent appearance of Prime Minister Tsipras in a series of functions in the USA, revealed some of his basic deficits. First, he played the wrong card in the wrong place. His main theme at all functions was the restructuring of the Greek debt. But this is in the hands of European institutions – not American or international. The US and the IMF, which is dominated by them, are pushing for, not against it. This should become the music of European not American ears. Playing it on the other side of the Atlantic might be counter-productive.
On the other hand, the investment music, which he should be playing there, was not very clear. This was particularly noticeable in his embarrassing silence to Clinton’s opening on energy investments in Greece. His chains to the trade-unionists of Public Power Corporation were heavily noticeable. In general, our Prime Minister continues playing foreign policy, with his mind fixed to its domestic impact: an extremely lacking approach.
His great weakness, which he shares unfortunately with many of his fellow politicians is their origin in the party tube: A feature apparent in all Greek parties. Our politicians have been born and reared as apparatchiks in party youth groups, which are schools for party hooliganism and neanderthalean fanaticism, not for democracy. Mr. Tsipras is dragged by the extra weight of his descent from the radical left. A political space of paleolithic ideology and virtual reality, which grows just nettles of obsession and party fanaticism.
However, we must say, that beginning with last summer and his riddance of the Varoufakean pest, Mr. Tsipras appears as having started to come to grasp with hard European realities and – what is more hopeful – adapt to them.
He also appears to have begun understanding international economic and political interactions and the rules of this highly complex game. But here two of his serious handicaps have surfaced: his lack of any previous experience and his Marxist blinders.
This is the only explanation for his apparent refusal to answer Clinton’s helpful questions about the prospects of investments in energy, in Greece. His reaction was that of a child running away from a bitter medicine. Mr. Tsipras seems to begin grasping the truth about the “new” and “old” but insists in his fight for a hopelessly old Public Power Corporation, for a steam-rolled educational system and other obsessions of an ante-diluvian Marxism.
The quest, however, for Greece and the rest of the world is a new development model that overshoots both Marxist archaeology and inhuman capitalist greed. The basic elements of this new model are abundantly manifest in the Greek cultural ideal of a society of communion and noble competition.
Mr. Tsipras,
The solution to the Greek drama is not another round of grave-digging in statism, but a leap forward to the responsibility of freedom. Should you dare it, using the right personalities irrespective of party allegiance, you will pass down in History. If not, you will continue destroying this Country at an accelerating tempo.
Maximos