Greek ex-PM Tsipras issues memoir ahead of expected comeback
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Former Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipra is broadly believed to be planning the creation of a new political movement or party.
PHOTO: REUTERS
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ATHENS - Greece’s former prime minister Alexis Tsipras on Nov 24 released a long-awaited memoir, 10 years after a traumatic management of the country’s debt crisis and as he reportedly mulls a political comeback.
The former pony-tailed Communist youth leader, who came to power in 2015 as an anti-austerity firebrand, was eventually forced to negotiate a multi-billion-euro rescue with Greece’s EU-IMF creditors.
Now aged 51, he has said he felt an “obligation” to “recount the events as I experienced them, to capture the conditions, the conflicts, the dilemmas, and the cost”.
“It is time for my voice to be heard,” he said in a statement earlier in November.
The memoir – an epic 730 pages – is titled “Ithaki”, the Ionian island also known as Ithaca, where Mr Tsipras in 2018 emphatically declared Greece’s exit from its decade-long economic crisis.
Much of his ire recounting Greece’s troubled financial odyssey is directed at former comrades, including then-finance minister Yanis Varoufakis.
There are also tidbits about Mr Tsipras’ tightrope negotiations with world leaders, including Mr Barack Obama, Dr Angela Merkel and Mr Vladimir Putin.
He recalls Dr Merkel being left “speechless” by his decision to hold a referendum on the EU-IMF rescue deal.
Mr Obama offered behind-the-scenes guidance, but Mr Putin bluntly turned down an offer to buy Greek government bonds, saying he would rather give the money to an orphanage.
Mr Tsipras insists the referendum, in which Greeks overwhelmingly voted to reject further cuts, was a “weapon” to stave off national “humiliation”.
Mr Tsipras resigned in 2023 after a crushing defeat to the conservative New Democracy party of Mr Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the current prime minister.
The Syriza party repeatedly fractured after Mr Tsipras’ departure, and currently polls in sixth place at around 5.0 per cent.
Mr Tsipras in 2024 formed a political institute, and is broadly believed to be planning the creation of a new political movement or party, which polls show would receive support from around 20 per cent of voters. AFP
