Why Greece’s socialists just might be political masterminds

By Max Ehrenfreund July 2 at 8:19 AM

Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis reacts at the start of the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) Board of Governors, ahead of the Eurogroup Meeting of Finance ministers in Luxembourg, on June 18. (Photo by Julien Warnand/EPA)

Suppose senior government officials in Greece had concluded that the euro was a failed experiment, that the rest of the continent would never extend reasonable terms to their country and would instead doom it to perpetual recession, and that the only way to save Greece from disaster -- and Europe, too -- was to begin the process of unwinding the common currency.
They'd have encountered a major obstacle to leaving the euro: Greeks really like it. To get rid of it, the country's leaders would have had just one option: sabotage negotiations with the creditors, blame them for being unreasonable, and then eventually tell voters that Greece has no choice but to go back to the drachma.
If that's the Greek strategy, as Simon Nixon speculates in The Wall Street Journal, it seems to be working:

If [Prime Minister Alexis] Tsipras had set out in January to take Greece out of the eurozone, it is very hard to think of anything he would have done differently. He won the election on a pledge to respect the overwhelming desire of voters to remain in the eurozone, which meant he had no choice but to go through the motions of negotiating with Greece’s creditors for as along as they were willing to indulge him. If Grexit was always his goal, then his only challenge was to ensure the talks dragged on until the bailout expired, capital controls were introduced and the country defaulted, making a euro exit hard to avoid.
If this was Mr. Tsipras’s plan, he has played it perfectly.

He has played it so perfectly, in fact, that the rest of the world is busily calling Tsipras and his advisers naïve and incompetent, not realizing that he's already won.
"A few years ago many of the men now in charge spent their time discussing the contradictions of capitalism over coffee and cigarettes," The Economist opined in May. "Few had ever run anything, let alone a government."
Maybe this analysis gives Tsipras too much credit. As Nixon notes, it's impossible to know what the premier was really thinking, and if his goal was to keep the country in the euro, he has done a terrible job.
On the other hand, he is being advised by his finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, an economist widely respected for his work on game theory.
Happy 4th of July! Wonkbook will return on Monday.

We agree with the assessment that the socialists wanted all along to leave the Euro.  Many people wanted to do so.  Greece already implemented many creditor-required reforms that created widespread poverty for the last 5-7 years.  The unemployment is 27 percent - this was a disaster.  What did the EU expected the Greeks to do?

More concessions would make things worse for the poorest people.  It is time to devalue the currency and the only way to do it is to go back to the Greek drachma.  There is a large underground market and we believe people will be alright, despite the headlines.