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The overarching metaphor for the negotiations between Greece and its creditors has been that of a poker game. “Tsipras has raised the stakes” or “the IMF has decided to call the Greek bluff” news outlet after news outlet have gleefully declared for months. Staying with this simple image, what does the result of Sunday’s Greek referendum mean? Quite simply, that Tsipras had a trump card which nobody saw coming.
So, when the moment came for the players to turn over their cards, the Greek Prime Minister declared: “I have the complete trust of a huge majority of the people I represent. What have you all got?” They have nothing.
Had the EU accepted the single most repeated request of the Greek side, which was to negotiate at the political level, they would not have found themselves bust like this. Tsipras would be sitting at the table with other elected leaders. They would be holding the same democratic trump card. But they didn’t. Instead, they insisted he negotiate with the technocrats of the Troika. Insisted on relegating him to the kids’ table.
It was this policy of humiliation that led them to this final disastrous dance. For all the world to see, Tsipras has an unprecedented democratic mandate. Not only that, but he has reinforced it by achieving an agreement with all the other Greek major parties. They are completely behind him, with the exception of the communists and the fascists, on whose side - the side of "the spoilers" - the Troika now find themselves.
They have numbers, he has people. They give figures and graphs, he replies with real stories of real people suffering. He has a breezy smile and an open white shirt, they have grave frowns and grave ties. An increasingly Eurosceptic population across the continent looks on with interest. What will they do? Concede defeat or overturn the table and refuse to play? If they do the former he wins, if they do the latter they lose.
Their responses are garbled, incomprehensible, comical even. Commissioner Dombrovskis gave a press conference on Monday morning. This referendum was pointless, he protested. The offer it concerned is no longer on the table. This referendum had no legal basis, he added. People didn’t understand the question. A journalist asked: “Wasn’t it here, in this very room, only days ago that President Juncker was urging people to vote yes?”
It is a fair question. If this referendum was irrelevant, illegitimate, stupid, why did every major player both at the EU and member-state level spend the last ten days obsessively, aggressively, undemocratically trying to manipulate its result? A pause. Dombrovskis responded: “A yes vote would have facilitated an agreement. A no vote complicates things.” Yes, that is the thing about democracy. It is unpredictable and messy. Markets demand certainty. Democracy cannot provide it. That basic tension is becoming increasingly clear at the EU level.
But all this is atmosphere. Does the referendum “OXI” response change anything at the negotiating level? One view is that it changes nothing. Another is that it changes everything.
It changes nothing in the sense that it is unlikely to make countries facing increasing political difficulties in their domestic parliaments suddenly offer a much improved deal. Their reticence was never rational - it was dictated by political realities. Had the matter been dealt with logically, one would have calculated the financial damage each day of uncertainty causes, the billions lost in markets around the world, the years of lost growth for Europe and restructured the Greek debt immediately, decisively and finally.
An improved deal may be offered, but that will be more a function of the fact that a very clear IMF report on Friday has now declared the Greek debt unsustainable. As Yanis Varoufakis - the sacrificial lamb of this affair - has always said.
But the result also changes everything because it has forced all the bureaucratic operators, who like to stay within the shadows, out in the open. It has shone a light on the EU’s democratic deficit that, up to a few months ago, was in the gloom of conspiracy theory. It has created, singlehandedly, a cogent case for left-of-center Euroscepticism. It has created an iconic battle between faceless grey bureaucracy and Alexis Tsipras, man of the people.
The European Central Bank on Monday declared its hand. Instead of relaxing liquidity provisions it decided to tighten the screw, to choke the Greek economy further. A woman queuing in front of an ATM, interviewed on Greek TV gave her reaction: "We're not stupid. We knew what was happening. We knew there was worse to come. We voted, knowing. We are ready."
A poll yesterday gave Podemos - Syriza’s sister party in Spain - a clear and boosted lead. These arguments will not go away. They will come back involving multiple amounts. In the well-known fable, it only took one person to point out the Emperor is naked. That is where we are. The question has been posed: Is this going to be a union of people, of equals, of solidarity or is it going to be a cruel steam roller of market harmonization? Will it be numbers or people? This question can never be taken back.
French President Hollande is already making noises of a conciliatory nature. Will others listen? Merkel's statement on Monday evening was harsh. But was she speaking primarily to a domestic audience? Someone needs to take charge of the situation and resolve it. It is, actually, easy. Let us start by admitting that the medicine given to Greece for five years was poison and that Greece’s economic recovery is as critical to the whole union as it is to Greece. Because it is the right thing to do. Because it is absolutely true.
This has been Tsipras’s achievement and the referendum’s true result. It has transformed a crisis which was desperately disguised as economic into what it really is: a crisis of values. It has reframed the search for Greece’s salvation to a search for a savior of the entire European project. What will it be? People or numbers?
Alex Andreou writes for The Guardian, The New Statesman and BBC Radio 4. He blogs at Sturdyblog and you can follow him on Twitter @sturdyalex
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