Dobra zgodba Neila Irwina:

Alexis Tsipras, the Greek prime minister, has spent the last six months, since his left-wing Syriza party came to power, trying to shift the entire political framework of his country’s bailout negotiations. That effort has failed. By indicating that his government could accept much of what Greece’s creditors demanded as conditions for a bailout extension late last week, Mr. Tsipras seems to have finally acknowledged this inability to reset the terms of debate over austerity and democracy in Europe.

For five years, the simple trade-off offered by the richer European countries and the European Central Bank has been this: If Greece accepts massive austerity — like pension cuts and layoffs of government employees — it can remain in the eurozone with the help of bailouts, with central bank credit extended to Greek banks, and so on. Austerity was the price to be paid for keeping the monetary stability created by the euro currency.

Mr. Tsipras believes — and plenty of American and British economists are sympathetic to this view — that this trade-off was driven by bad economics and had disastrous human consequences. Austerity without debt write-downs created a depression, making the debt burden even harder to handle.

So instead of accepting the basic trade-off that creditors have been offering Greece for five years, with those disastrous results, Mr. Tsipras has tried to create an environment in which European leaders would have to rethink their understanding of the proper trade-offs for Greece.

…

But the effort has failed. The deal on offer from creditors late last week, before the Greek government walked away from negotiations and called a referendum, fit the same basic framework of trading austerity for bailouts of earlier deals, even if it made some adjustments around the edges to lessen some of the pain.

The Greek government was surely hoping that by walking away and calling a referendum, the creditors would rethink their intransigence, fearful of the economic and geopolitical consequences of letting Greece leave the eurozone. If anything, it pushed Germany and France, as well as Spain and Italy, closer together, full of exasperation with the Greeks’ negotiating style and aggressive demands.

…

Mr. Tsipras was hoping that the threat of a Greek exit would get Europe to blink. The opposite seemed to happen.

Against that backdrop, his choices were limited. He could either reopen the negotiations within the basic framework the creditors demanded, or face being the prime minister who drove Greece away from Europe, losing his own job, or both.

He chose the former. But with the country already having missed a debt payment to the International Monetary Fund and events unfolding quickly and unpredictably, the question now is whether he was too late.

Vir: Neil Irwin, The Upshot